


With you I'm in warm water (swimming down)

by Vracs



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Daddy K cameo, F/F, Post Season 2, Slow Burn, a story of healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-04-19 18:36:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19138378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vracs/pseuds/Vracs
Summary: Eve wakes up in a back alley vet hospital outside of Rome. The rest is what should have happened in Alaska, except it happens in Italy.





	1. Chapter 1

_I knew the meaning right away_

_We only yesterday, were worlds apart_

 

//

 

The first time she wakes up, it’s to firm hands gripping beneath her arms. They drag and drag her, dust and rubble clawing at her clothes.

The Roman sun beats down on her.

It makes her wretch. It _hurts_. It burns beneath her ribs, a nauseating, pulsing ache that spreads through her back like wildfire and curdles her sweat.

Her head bounces off the ground. Her vision fills with spots, mouth brimming with copper.

The last thing she sees is red.

 

The second time, she finds herself in bed. Not her own.

There is a window, at least. The street sign reads in Italian and she bolts up, the sharp stab of it hurling her straight back into her pillow.

She gasps, scraping at the bandages around her waist.

They’re clean, as far as she can see. Drenched in sweat, but bloodless. Somebody must’ve had to dig for the bullet from the front.

She licks her dry lips, mouth stuffed with cotton. The scratch in her throat brings tears to her eyes and she lifts her arm to wipe at her face, realising that she’s connected.

An IV bag hangs empty from the drip stand.

On further inspection, she realises there is a tube – a drain, of some sort – tucked into her dressing. When she rubs her thighs together, she’s mortified to find that she’s also been given a catheter bag.

“ _Fuck_.”

“Ah!” The voice is deep, pleased. Eve opens her reluctant eyes to see a burly, olive-skinned man propped by the doorway. He wears black scrubs and a theatre hat.

She frowns.

“Your friend,” he says softly, putting gloves on before coming to the side of her bed. Something inside Eve twists at the words. “She bring you to me. Mattia,” he tells her with a smile and a warm hand to her shoulder, as if she should know him, as if it were common for him to be gifted a half-dead woman on his doorstep.

The first thing she thinks is, _she came back for me_. The second, _I’m going to fucking kill her._

“Where am I?”

She watches as he inspects her drain bag. It’s empty. That must be a good thing, she thinks, cringing when he peels away the sheets and her sticky gown to check her wound.

“ _Ospedale veterinario_ ,” he presses on her stomach gently. She swats at his hand, disgruntled. “It makes pain?”

Eve wants to punch him. Feels her fists clench in her bedsheets, in distress and frustration, at not knowing what time it is, where the fuck she is, how she ended up here and most importantly, when she was to expect her release.

She feels like a caged animal, which is ironic given her location. Her room smells like dog shit and sweat.

She tenses her jaw and takes a deep breath. “Yes,” she says as gently as she can, sighing when Mattia hooks up another bag of fluid to her right hand, and a bag of _antibiotici_ to her other.

How she is expected to wipe her own ass, she isn’t sure. Not that it’s been an issue thus far - she can’t remember her last meal. Her stomach whines loudly on cue and Mattia laughs.

“ _Bene!_ You make wind soon. And after, you walk. You try. Then, _tiriamo fuori il catetere_.”

Fuck him for speaking Italian.

Eve grunts and stretches her heels off the bed. She can barely feel them. She prays she’s not developing a pressure sore.

She doesn’t have long to think on it before the rigors start again, flushing her in heat and sweat and agony unlike any she’s felt before.

Through the mind-numbing haze of it, she thinks of Villanelle. Her chest begins to ache too.

Mattia only brings her mouth sponges, sympathetic, to his credit and Eve sucks on them, furiously and hungrily until the plastic stick snaps between her teeth.

She quickly realises that her recovery boils down to a waiting game. Presumably Mattia had been the one to sew her shut, top her up with blood and opioids and set some good groundwork for nature to do the rest.

Days later, she will sit with him for the last time and he will tell her, in broken English and half-Latin, that the bullet had missed her spinal cord and aorta by inches. That had it been a little to her left, it may have burst her spleen and left her for dead in the middle of an archaeological site. That she had been in acute renal failure and sepsis the first time he’d taken her bloods, _but no problem, I fix._ That, much to her dismay, she is only the third human being he has ever operated on. It will make her wonder whether him and Villanelle have a long-standing arrangement and he will tell her, “You are lucky your friend bring you. More minutes, and I don’t know you live” and Eve will let her anger boil freely, wishing she had the strength to tell him the truth.

Because that word, _friend, friend, friend_ feels like a slap each time Mattia names it.

There are flashes only.

Flashes of Villanelle’s steely eyes. The downturn of her mouth. The brush of her hand to her wrist, fingers to her chin, arm around her waist.

Flashes of Villanelle’s trembling voice and then the calm, stoniness of it all. Flashes of her turning away, always turning away.

Flashes of the thundering echo and the sudden pressure, clear as day, sticky and hot beneath her palms as she’d hit the floor. And the candy red, of her hands, of Villanelle retreating, and then remerging, hazy and frenzied. Or had it all been a fevered dream?

The hallucinations bleed into one.

For now, she watches the evening hours creep. The fan rattles in the corner but her sweat collects, as do the flies, buzzing incessantly around her tray table. It doesn’t hold much: a cup of untouched water, a hair-tie, her wristwatch.

She follows the hands of the clock on the wall, its plaster beginning to crumble where ceiling meets door.

It hits her then. Nobody is looking for her. 

She’s entirely alone, in a veterinarian’s room somewhere in Rome – no, somewhere in Italy, catheterised and doped up on horse tranquilisers.

She digs her nails into her clammy palms and lets her fury engulf her along with her fever.

 

It’s day seven before her feet hit the ground. She thought she’d be quicker about it - recovering from a gunshot wound.

She comes to, before the sun, woken by hushed voices just beyond her door. Her pulse has settled – the observation monitor tells her so.

She catches snippets of conversation.

“ _Una casa_.”

“ _Ma_ \- ”

“ _– quando è pronta –_ “

“ _E pagamento?_ ”

“ _\- preoccupare - Io phagero –_ “

Eve had spent enough time in Rome to know Mattia is talking to a non-native Italian speaker. The _r_ s curl, too soft to hit the palate right. The more she listens, the hotter she feels, her heart starting to hammer wildly with realisation. The monitor begins to beep, flashing red in the dawn light, and Eve squeezes her eyes shut, her cannula pulling as she rolls onto her uninjured side to feign sleep.

Somebody comes to check on her. She pretends to drowse, oblivious to the tall observing figure standing by the door as she lets her blood pressure be taken, a temperature probe shoved unceremoniously into her ear.

It isn’t until hours later, in the still, brightness of her room that she opens her eyes.

There is a dog by her bed. A scruffy three-legged thing with a pitiful face that Eve stares at for a long time. He watches her curiously, panting, frightened to push closer even as Eve reaches out her hand to lay gently over the wet muzzle.

Has she become so monstrous, that a mutt won’t even have her? Can he smell the blood on her? She glances at her fingernails, but they are clean. Her skin is green and blue where blood had been taken.

When she reaches to scratch behind his ears, the dog licks, once, over her fingertips and then snarls in distaste, hobbling away towards the distant clatter beyond her four walls.

“You meet Peppa,” Mattia calls from the hall, peering in to greet her with a smile.

“ _Peppa_. You’re shitting me?”

“Of course!” she watches his eyes widen proudly, “ _Mia bambina_ , she like it. The Peppa Pig?”

Eve laughs, humourless, taking great effort to prop herself up into a half-sit. “Fuck me.”

“You no have kids,” Mattia nods in understanding and Eve could strangle him for it. Could wrap her fingers around his neck and squeeze the sunny disposition right out of his eager eyes. The thought brings glee and then a flash of guilt, quick and tight in her belly

As it turns out, Mattia explains, the road to recovery winds a careful sequence of cobblestones she is going to have to follow – race across, in fact, if she plans on leaving this shithole sooner rather than later. The cobblestones are high and uneven and for the first time in her life, Eve finds she is terrifically awful at something.

First, the IVs.

The antibiotics are the main thing to go. Mattia switches her to tablets and lets her have sips of water. The first swallow is a greedy gulp and it feels like heaven, sliding down her parched throat. She drinks until she chokes, envisaging herself on a rooftop, nursing a glass of wine instead. She gets soup for her first meal. She thinks, bittersweetly, of spaghetti and then chokes on that too, her wound throbbing to spite her.

Then there’s the matter of mobilisation.

Mattia finds her a dismantled zimmer frame – the brief image of a greyhound propelling itself on its hind legs tickles her only for a moment – and aside from getting in the way of absolutely everything, it makes her feel useless and geriatric, the stifling August wind blowing past her open gown and into her paper underwear. Her joints feel stiff, shins smattered with scrapes and bruises, and she drags them, the stitches pulling so tight she wonders how long it will take until she can stand straight again.

When she has the hang of that, the healthcare assistant helps to remove her catheter.

Exposing herself to a stranger is what finally undoes her. Once Bianca finishes supervising her pass urine, Eve collapses into bed, an exhausted, unravelling mess of limbs. She swipes the plastic cup off the table and onto the floor with the flick of her wrist, screaming into her pillow as she watches the water evaporate with the midnight heat.

 

Bianca brings her, her first breakfast. It’s brioche and coffee and Eve devours them both with gusto, nauseous and sated right after. It had been days since her last caffeine hit. The unexpected detox, everything else aside, had left her with a pounding head and a grouchy mood that Mattia had tolerated quietly and with saintly patience.

She feels the adrenaline kick in like a tsunami. Her hands tremble as Bianca helps her into her first not-sponge bath since she lost consciousness.

Bianca’s hands are soft, careful as they guide Eve beneath the shower head, helping with the taps so Eve can hold onto the wall for balance. Her eyes are ink black, Eve notes, looking back at her for any sign of discomfort, careful not to veer past her neckline.

Eve smiles tiredly. “I can handle it.”

“You are sure?”

She nods, watching as Bianca mirrors her, hanging a towel against the back of the door and slipping outside.

“I sit,” she motions towards the chair beside the bed, “you shout me.”

When the door clicks shut, Eve lets her forehead thud against the tiled wall. 

The water is lukewarm as the pipes come to life, burbling and hiccupping until it starts to pound against her shoulders and back. It hits the entry wound at her left flank, hammering into it until it begins to ache again, and she needs to turn her face towards the stream instead.

She stands for long moments, listening to the white noise. Mattia had removed the dressings for her, finally. He’d done it in one, fast, agonizing rip that Eve had been grateful for. It had felt like punishment – for being so stupid, for letting her guard down, for leading with her heart and not her brain.

She lets her hand slide against the exit site just up from her navel.

The skin is red and puckered beneath her fingertips. The scar is tidy, given Mattia’s lack of proficiency in human suturing, but the tissue beneath feels hard and jagged.

It’s ugly.

She jabs her thumb into it until her eyes well and she’s growling through the red-hot-electric pain of it.

She grimaces and pictures Villanelle laying beneath her, between her thighs, beneath her knife, her warm, chaotic energy bleeding right out of her and into Eve’s panicked hands.

She hadn’t seen it. Had planned to, but the opportunity kept slipping on by – Villanelle’s own scar, probably worn with pride and loathing just below her ribs. Eve wonders what Villanelle thinks of it when she looks in the mirror. Does she touch it? Does she dig until it throbs? Does it make her come? Cry?

Eve laughs bitterly.

She knows they’ll match. Connected in yet another way.

She guesses perhaps that had been Villanelle’s sole intention.

Something inside her shudders, agitated, right beneath her breastbone like a helium balloon. And then it bursts and leaves her gasping, lightheaded, as her vision blurs and she stumbles into the door.

Bianca is at her side in minutes, trying to contain her as she curls into herself, away from firm, calloused hands.

“Get off me. Get _off_ me,” she bites, swatting away the cradling fingers at her elbows as Bianca uses hushed tones with her and reaches to shut off the water. “I said, _fuck off_!” She lifts her head to see the young woman startled, even as she does her best not to let Eve fall.

“ _Mi dispiace_ – sorry,” she stutters handing Eve the towel and turning away. “Sorry,” she whispers again as Eve wraps herself angrily inside the rough cotton.

She hadn’t even washed her hair. Had barely bothered to reach for the soap, though she supposes a rinse was better than nothing.

She’s grumpy and sheepish when she realises, she’s not going to make it to the bed on her own. She runs a hand through her wet hair and clears her throat.

Bianca looks at her with careful eyes, mouth quirked and pink, like her cheeks. Strands of hair stick to her temples from the damp heat. In another world, Eve may have entertained the idea of being coddled, and then possibly fucked right up against the bathroom wall.

In another world.

She lets Bianca wrap an arm around her waist, relieved that her childish outburst goes overlooked as she’s helped across the room, stewing in her own shame and arousal, “ _Mi dispiace_ – uh, as well.”

She sees the leather suitcase at the foot of her bed before Bianca points to it.

“Clothes.”

Eve feels her throat close, tongue thick and dry inside her mouth as she tries to swallow.  She lets her ears swell with her quickening pulse.

“Where did this come from?” her fingers itch to work past the zip but she tucks her hands into her armpits and averts her gaze. When she glances at Bianca, there is a curious look there, one of confusion and bemusement.

“Your friend. She bring. She say – eh – you take –“ Bianca shakes her head, laughing at herself as she runs a soothing hand along Eve’s wet arm. “ _Uno momento -_ ” and then she’s scurrying out of the room, shouting after Mattia who comes some minutes later, hands covered in blood and a surgical mask across his face.

“The clothes? From your friend. Billie. She bring for you, she say she make car for you. Okay?”

Eve feels the back of her neck prickle with rage, but she rubs it off. Mattia had been on the receiving end of her temper one too many times. She steadies her voice.

“Did she say where she is? What car? When was she here?”

Mattia shrugs, wriggling his fingers in the air. “I have operation. Later, I explain.”

Except there is no later.

Eve barely – _begrudgingly -_  gets dressed, furious that the clothes, as always, are thoughtful and practical and sized perfectly, her linen pants thin and elasticated, T-shirt loose enough for her injuries to breathe.

There is more: sandals, underwear, toiletries, pyjamas, a _bikini_ , (Eve seethes), a collection of tops and trousers, a summer dress.

She slams the suitcase shut and finds Bianca at her side, reminding her to drink some water, pointing to the perspiration on her face. Eve doesn’t feel hot one bit. She feels restless and chilled as though someone had tossed her in ice. She takes the water and follows Bianca out past the operating theatre and into Mattia’s office.

Her discharge papers lie, neatly piled on his desk. Eve rolls her eyes. They are written in Italian.

A paper bag of what she presumes is her medication, sits beside her documents.

“Listen. I’m going to wait for Matt to finish up, so he can explain to me what I need to do with this -” she motions with her hand, “crap. The stitches need taking out at some point, right?”

Bianca stares at her blankly. She nods once and Eve puffs her cheeks out, sighing.

“Right.” Her wound pulsates. She scoops the stuff into her arm and quirks her eyebrow. “Now what?”

“Your car,” Bianca points out. Yes. _Obviously_. Eve groans.

A black Mercedes waits for her, parked neatly at the building’s entrance, the owner of which occupies the driver’s seat, bald head peering over the headrest.

He doesn’t move to greet her. Doesn’t open the door for her.

Only gives a gruff, “Hello, Eve,” once Bianca has loaded the suitcase into the trunk and deposited her across the back seat.

There is no time for goodbye. Her voice drowns in the loud clang of Italian music as the car speeds off, Bianca’s friendly face the last familiar thing she sees.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want more shenanigans and yearning? Come tweet me @vracs1!


	2. Chapter 2

//

 

The house sits in a hilly field, a couple of hours out towards the middle of nowhere. Trying to keep an eye on the sat-nav hadn’t given her many clues as to their whereabouts.

Her chauffer – no name, not even a nod – had remained silent and glum on the drive, stopping only briefly: to make a call and take a piss.

His phone had buzzed once against the dashboard. She'd been quick to catch the message before it got swiped.

_Keys under mat. Keep her safe. V_

Subsequently, she'd spent the rest of the drive stewing in dread. She knew for certain that Villanelle wouldn’t be waiting at her destination. Knew with a little less clarity, just how precariously her life continued to hang in the balance.

She’d passed the journey picturing the worst-case scenario: arriving at a dilapidated shack, phoneless and feverish; waiting – for how long, she’s not sure - for Villanelle to come or not come; having Villanelle finish the job properly, gun to her head this time, or curved blade straight to the chest; screaming and screaming into the vast, consuming nothingness of the Italian countryside.

She finds herself some hundred kilometres farther, irreversibly wrecked and left to fend for herself at the gate to a meandering footpath. Her suitcase had been thrown at her feet, the screech of tyres and rubber stench her driver’s last parting gift.

She should be thankful, she supposes, that she’s greeted by a villa and not a warehouse.

Small mercies.

She spends long moments staring at it: the bougainvillea that line the walls, gathered at the windowsill like schoolchildren; the wooden shutters and white, pristine stone reflecting sunlight straight into her eyes; the cypress trees; the cluster of plant pots, nestled crookedly in shade.

She hauls her luggage in, acutely aware,  _always_  aware, of the sweat, its constant presence, sticking beneath her arms and between her thighs.

The cool darkness of the interior helps a little.

There is white – for the sofa, the curtains and for what she can make of the bedroom.

The rest is in chestnut browns – bulky, heart-stopping furniture that makes Eve want to run her hands all along it, to feel the supple give in the notched wood.

The walls are yellow.  _Not_ decorated by Villanelle then, Eve thinks. It slices sharp and clean straight through her domestic bliss and Eve finds herself growing restless again, reminded of her complete solitude, the direct product of Villanelle’s doing.

She leaves her luggage by the door and steps to the kitchen. Finishes a glass of water. Rummages through the copper pots and pans, delighted and enraged to find a selection of herbs and jars lined up thoughtfully in the cupboard adjacent.

The surfaces are pristine, fridge freshly stocked.

Eve’s stomach growls. She grinds her teeth. There are distinct champagne bottles – half a dozen – nestled in the fridge door.

Her fingers trawl up one, chafing with familiarity and the need to smash it all over Villanelle’s ceramic tiles. She fizzes with pleasure at the thought: leaving Villanelle’s Italian villa in shreds (a hat-trick then, almost!), smearing a great, big  _fuck you_  in lipstick all over Villanelle’s mirrors like a scorned wife, sticking a knife in her 10,000 thread count Egyptian cotton and sofa cushions, a stabbing motion better suited for a living, breathing body. Walking away from it all. Again. She's quite good at that now.

Except there are no phones here. No map. No internet either, she figures.

Only a TV with stacked rows of DVDs and a small upright Steinway tucked against the garden-facing window.

_Someone to watch movies with._

Eve combs both hands through her hair, then grabs it in fistfuls.

Under Villanelle’s heel, again. A pet to cage.  She kicks the stack of DVDs until they topple, smashing a hand on the ivory keys but it doesn’t bring relief. Only a sharp, jarring sound that leaves a ringing in her ears and an empty hole in her chest.

She yanks her suitcase to the bedroom to look for a change of clothes. Her wound needs cleaning. Her soiled shirt reminds her that it’s time for her antibiotics.

She takes them with a glass of champagne, inside the ceramic bathtub centred within Villanelle’s  _en suite._

Its position looks out onto acres of land. Neat, little patchworks of olive or grape or whatever it is Italy’s famous for, Eve huffs, rolling her aching shoulders against the lip of the tub. The taps are gold. Naturally. The water smells like frankincense and makes her feel gaudy and indulgent but then again, she almost died so, why not? She drowns herself in it, and then in the Dom Perignon.

 

She jolts awake with the bang of the front door. Water sloshes out of the tub and she grapples for the towel but it remains feet away, flung across the sink.

She didn’t bring a knife with her. Didn’t even bring the rest of the bottle.

“Eve?”

Eve hisses.  _Oh shit_. Her hands tremble against the cool ceramic, scrambling for purchase. She flings her arms over her heaving chest, knees coming up to shield her _._ She doesn’t hear the rest above the pounding in her ears.

Her stomach coils tightly.

She swirls in the tub in time to see Villanelle hovering by the doorway, studying her.

“You are here.”

Villanelle wears a small, pleased smile, hands tucked into the pockets of her green sundress.

Eve prays for the tub to swallow her hole, and then for the strength to rise and run, naked in all her glory, over the threshold and at Villanelle, to slam her onto the floor with the force of her thighs so she can take a good look before she wrings wet hands around her neck.

The hunger for it claws inside her and she starts to vibrate. With grief and rage and humiliation.

Villanelle steps fully into the bathroom.

She appraises the situation – the champagne glass, the clothes she bought Eve piled beside it.

She moves towards the bath to perch on its edge.

Eve shrinks deeper into the water. It does little to cover her modesty. She loathes the look Villanelle gives her: dark, lingering eyes on her shivering shoulders and then lower, brows raised expectantly.

“How do you feel?”

Naked, Eve thinks. And so many other things, but primarily naked, and  _constantly_  angry. The accidental nap has already given her a hangover. It makes the space between her eyes throb. She swallows.

“Fantastic.”

Villanelle laughs delightedly. “See? I  _told_  you I would take care of you. This place is amazing, right? Not Alaska but – you know,” she makes a face, “ _border control._ ”

Eve watches her reach for the champagne glass on the floor to take an indulgent sip before handing the rest back, hand free to sweep through the now-cold water.

“When did you come?”

Eve’s fingertips have shrivelled. There is no clock but if she had to guess, she’d certainly spent over an hour in the tub and just as long perusing the house, wishing it would burn to the ground. She shrugs. She’s dying for that towel.

She feels Villanelle’s eyes on her neck again, on the water lapping at her chest, penetrating through it, searching curiously for, well, Eve knows exactly what.

“Are you hungry?”

She shifts, folding protective arms over her stomach. “A little.”

“A little,” Villanelle smiles tenderly, reaching to wipe water from her cheek. Eve flinches. Notes instantly the fall in Villanelle’s face, the familiar metallic glint in her cold eyes. She rises, hands flicking over her dress - it falls to mid-thigh. They’re more tanned now, Eve realises, then hates herself for noticing.

“I’m going to cook dinner, okay?” Villanelle says, reaching to hand her the towel, “Take your time. We have  _so_ much time,” her jaw flickers and Eve feels it stoke the horrid fire within her, grateful moments later when she’s alone again, her scars kept hidden, for her eyes only.

 

Villanelle makes spaghetti, as promised.

Eve watches her wolf it down, elbows on the table, legs folded like a man’s. There’s red all around her mouth. It makes her look feral, manic. Eve stabs at her plate half-heartedly. 

“You don’t like it?” Villanelle nods towards her untouched food. There’s a softness to her, an expectant sort of disappointment that Eve almost feels guilty for.

Perhaps the worst thing about it is that her meal  _is_  cooked to perfection. Any other given day, she might have finished it in minutes, doused in wine. Now, she feels bloated with vindicative pleasure, knowing that Villanelle had spent a good hour pouring her soul into the dish – Eve had watched her pick overripe tomatoes straight from the garden, fresh garlic and thyme, while she’d drawn out the process of getting dried and dressed.

She lets her fork clatter out of her hand and slides her chair back.

“So, we’re just going to sit here. Is that how this is going to go?”

The chewing stops and Villanelle looks up at her with wide, innocent eyes.

“ _Don’t_  look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

Eve burns. “Like you didn’t fucking  _gun_  me down!”

“ _Eve_.” And God, the way she whispers it, quiet and sweet like she’s talking to a child, makes Eve want to hurl her fork across the room. “You aren’t still mad at me, are you? It was – a joke,” she shrugs.

“A joke.”

“Sure. You stab, I shoot,” she sing-songs, shoulders shimmying, “We are even now -  _Wait_. You didn’t think I would  _leave_  you, did you? I saved your life. You are welcome.”

Eve laughs, a shrill, hysterical sound. Her fingers scrape angrily through her hair as she stares up to the ceiling.

“You’re right. Oh God, you’re absolutely right!” she gasps. She can feel herself start to shake. “I get it. It was a  _gesture._ A romantic – what? Accident? Crime of passion, huh? And then what? You took me to a  _vet_? To - to get botched up by a twenty-something year old who can’t string a sentence? To have someone watch me take a piss? To be left alone, in a foreign country, with no phone, no  _fucking_ idea where I was, no way to call for help, no way of knowing when the fuck I was getting  _out_?”

She’s saying the words but they all blur into one incoherent, panting mess because she’s sweating now and her wound hurts, it pounds, she can feel it in her back right through to her stomach.

Villanelle sighs. She rolls her eyes dramatically and abandons her chair to come around the table.

“You are making yourself upset. You need to breathe.”

 _You are making me upset,_ Eve wants to scream.

A hand comes to rest against her shoulder and Eve uses her last remaining strength to wrench it away, shoving Villanelle back as she sucks in air. The movement jars something within her. She clutches her stomach. Doubles over in her seat, eyes swimming.

She wills herself not to cry.

Villanelle cannot see her cry.

“Eve.”

“Stop.”

“Eve,” Villanelle deadpans, crouching to the floor to seek out her face. Eve hides behind her curtain of hair. She’s trembling all over. “Listen to me. You can be angry with me, sure,” she shrugs, “if it makes you feel better. You can shout at me. We can fight, if you want - I will even let you win. But you will make yourself sick and there are no doctors here. If your stitches rip, we will be in trouble.”

She’s trapped. Of course, she is.

Eve lets her teeth grind. She lifts her face from the safety of her hands.

Meets Villanelle’s concerned eyes with her own.

And as honestly and gravely as she can manage, she snarls, “I should’ve killed you when I had the chance.”

A shadow passes over Villanelle’s face, and then it’s gone. She nods solemnly, bottom lip jutting into a pout.

“That’s not very nice.”

“No.”

“I am trying to help you. And you are being rude.”

Eve nods. Sucks her lips over her teeth. “You got me into this shit.”

She watches Villanelle collect their plates before heading to the sink. For a moment, she thinks her comment might get swept under the rug. She huffs tiredly, following Villanelle as she makes quick work of the washing up, her back straight, movements calm, choreographed like a dance as she navigates her kitchen. 

She longs to step up behind her. To reach for the largest knife in the stand and run it in one neat tug right across her throat, just like she’d done to Aaron. The thrill of it zaps inside her, then bleeds into disgust at the knowledge that, in her current state, Villanelle could probably kill her with a flick of her wrist if she so wanted.

She steps up dejectedly to the counter to take her medication instead. Accepts a full glass from Villanelle, who doesn’t make eye contact with her. Only stares ahead, sombre.

“I could have left you to bleed out.”

Eve gulps back the pills. The stitches pull at her. They’ll need removing soon.

“You should have.”

Villanelle’s head snaps towards her, a surprised frown cast over her eyes.

“You heard me.”

“You would rather be dead. ”

“Yeah.”

“ - than be here.”  _With me_.

Eve scoops her hair defiantly into a bun and folds her arms across her chest. “Yes.”

The silence stretches between them. For the first time, Eve lets herself stare back, unphased. Her spine straightens. She can see that Villanelle is tired. There are dark circles beneath her eyes, face ashen and gaunt. She’s lost weight.

Eve entertains the thought that perhaps things hadn’t been so easy for her either. Had Villanelle worried about her? Regretted what she’d done? Spent countless hours on a beach somewhere, looking for her next doppelganger to hunt?

She tries a different way.

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“I told you already,” Villanelle’s eyes widen with excitement.

“ _After_  you shot me,” Eve clarifies.

She blows out her cheeks, as if the answer were the most obvious thing in the world. “I was going to take you to Alaska – just like you wanted,” she says sweetly, “to a nice cabin somewhere in the mountains, with one of those bear rugs, you know? I  _love_  the bear rugs. To take care of you. Fresh air, long walks...”

A beat. “You’re serious.”

“I didn’t think your recovery would take so long. Really, Eve,” she steps closer, so close, Eve can smell that familiar, hot, floral scent, “ _Eleven_  days? It was just a scratch. I aimed r _eally_ straight.”

Eve laughs bitterly. “I was septic.”

“I know. Mattia told me.”

“Of course, he did. You almost punctured my kidney.”

Villanelle grimaces, shoulders rising in sympathy. “But…I didn’t?”

“And my aorta.”

“Sure.”

“My spleen.”

“But - ”

“They had me catheterised.”

At this, Villanelle gasps, smacking a hand against the marble top, “That is  _so_  sexy,” she smirks, leaning into it and cocking her head to the side as her eyes run over Eve’s clothing. “Did they give you one of those hospital gowns that tie in the back?” She moves to place her hand on Eve’s waist.

Instinctively, Eve’s fingers dart around her wrist, jostling her back into the counter. She grips until her knuckles turn white.

Villanelle laughs. “ _Eve_.”

Eve shakes her head, pinning her hips to Villanelle’s own, nostrils flaring as she digs her fingernails into Villanelle’s skin, stares at the flicker of her jugular, the warm flush that climbs up her neck and into her cheeks, the playful quirk of her mouth. With her other hand, she reaches for Villanelle’s neck, disregarding the décolletage of her dress.

Villanelle pants softly. Tilts her chin up to make it easier for her.

“Is this what you were waiting for?”

“You have no idea,” Eve grits out, gulping as she squeezes, Villanelle’s pulse firm against her hand. There’s a quick hiccupping sound. Eve can see the glimmering edge of Villanelle’s teeth.

This is so much better than a knife.

She squeezes harder.

Villanelle lets her do it. Croaks, “Does it feel good?”

“ _Yes_.”

She feels Villanelle’s fingers trace over her own, eyes staring knowingly back even as she changes colour from crimson to plum, hips bucking.

The sour adrenaline of it seeps into Eve’s chest until Villanelle sputters. She doesn’t put up a fight, eyes fluttering shut as Eve persists. And then her fingers begin to ache and she can't, can’t quite muster the courage to, the hatred to, colouring with something close to doubt instead, like dye in water, and she's dropping her hand and backing away on shaking legs, turning to block out Villanelle’s infuriating smugness, the heat of her body.

She scrapes stray hair behind her ear and wipes her sweaty forehead with quaking fingers as she makes a beeline for the bedroom, nerves shot. “I’m going to bed.”

The last thing she hears is, “Good night, Eve!” before her door slams shut.


	3. Chapter 3

//

 

She wakes up to the rattling of the smoothie maker. The bungalow smells of coffee. She follows the scent to the kitchen, rubbing her bleary eyes and then trying to tame her hair.

She sees Villanelle by the stove, the cerulean silk of her robe catching in the early light, hair gold and piled high on her head.

Eve yawns as she approaches tentatively.

Villanelle glances at her over her shoulders. Jostles the pan. Licks her fingertips.

“Good morning, Kill Commander. Sleep well?”

“Fine.”

She’d knocked out as soon as her head had hit the pillow, woken only by the chirping crickets and then, a little later, by the sun.

She eyes the sofa while Villanelle finishes cooking. It’s littered with cushions. A blanket sits crumpled on the floor. Villanelle’s dress hangs off the back rest.

She fills with momentary guilt.

“You made breakfast?”

“Pancakes,” Villanelle points at the towering stack, then turns to place a mug of coffee and a smoothie in front of her, “American favourite, no?”

Eve nods quietly. She stares at her coffee for a long time, into its dark, murky depths before taking a greedy swig. Bitter, just the way she likes it.

“Do you want sausage?”

“No,” she grumbles again, and then, “thank you.”

Villanelle brightens, loading their plates before knuckling down beside her, a little too close so their elbows brush. “So, you _can_ be polite.”

She ignores it. Her mouth is already watering, stomach tied up in painful knots at the sight of food. She wishes she hadn’t forsaken her dinner. She takes slow, generous mouthfuls and finds everything a bit too sweet, too greasy, too perfect and God, Villanelle can cook. She’s a master at it.

She’s almost worked her way through the entire pile when she realises, she’s being watched. She wipes her mouth.

“What?”

“This is… _nice_.”

“Yeah,” she says, “The coffee is uh – it’s just the way I take it.”

“I don’t mean the food, Eve.”

“Right.”

“Being here. With you,” Villanelle tries. She has that look – the one that treads the line between soul and shadow and pokes at Eve where it hurts most.

“Villanelle _._ ”

“It feels – _normal_. Don’t you think so?”

Villanelle’s eyes shine, fond, just like that time in Eve’s kitchen. A niggling, buried part of her wants to reach up and cradle her face, exactly like that time. She tightens her grip on her mug.

“There is nothing normal about you. About us.”

“I think so. I think we can be normal. You make me want to be normal, Eve. I- ”

Eve feels fingers clasp over her own, but she pulls away. She yearns to scratch at her wound. It’s starting to chafe. A sign of healing, she guesses.

“I need to -” she scrapes her chair along the ground, moving her plate to the sink, “sort out my stitches.”

“I can help you.”

“I got it.”

“Eve, come on, you - ”

“I _got_ it,” she snaps. The spray of the tap drowns out the rest and she scrubs furiously at her dishes, slumping when Villanelle comes to her side to help dry.

They work in tandem, quick and smooth and awkward. They work well. They always have done. If she wanted to, she could close her eyes and drown herself stupid in their domestic play-pretend bliss. How wonderfully absurd that would be.

She wipes her hands on her pants, watching the soap bubbles melt.

“You should talk to me,” Villanelle tells her gently when they’re done.

“You think you deserve that?”

“Yes. You will feel better.”

Eve thinks on it, for a moment. She turns to Villanelle and takes in her morning glow, her dewy skin, the open, surprising softness of her. Instead of rippling with her constant rage, she begins to ripple with a faint, lukewarm misery. It rises within her like smoke.

She takes a deep, heavy breath. Her eyes hurt.

“I just want to go home.”

Except this _is_ home, at least for now. She has nowhere else to go, no one else to want her. She waits for Villanelle to say something cruel, but it doesn’t come.

“You are safe here. When you are better, you can go - I promise. I’m not going to keep you a prisoner.”

Eve scoffs. “And yet.”

“I am just looking out for you, Eve. You want to go? There is the door. I have a job to finish but I will be back in a few hours.” She traces a light hand over Eve’s elbow, catching her briefly before Eve has a chance to refute her. “I will leave my phone and address – and some money - if you want to call a taxi.” After a minute, Villanelle licks her lips and shrugs. “But I would like it if you stayed.”

 

She spends long hours in the sun.

The garden is somewhat overgrown but there are roses and a swing seat and nothing but the sound of the summer wind hitting the shutters.

She stares at her wound and when she’s mustered the courage, her hands.

She’d killed someone. She’d taken broad, chaotic swings - _multiple_ times - at a human body. With an axe. And not half-heartedly, either.

She tries to remember what that had felt like. It seems like a distant, drunken nightmare now.

Unadulterated fear, to start. She’d wanted to vomit from the adrenaline, the sick, debilitating realisation that Villanelle’s life had somehow fallen into her own hands.

Then that had morphed into panic and instinct and blind determination. A helplessness, once the axe had wedged itself irreversibly, the whistling, sucking sound it had made on impact.

Then the beginning ambers of satisfaction, the thrill of Raymond’s body hitting the floor, smattering Villanelle in blood, her crazed smile gleaming with pride behind crimson.

And self-loathing shame, shutting her down with shellshock that Villanelle had nursed for her, all the way to Tivoli.

That makes her a criminal. A runaway. A woman with a failed marriage, no friends and as far as she knows, no job.

_Don’t add. Take away everything._

All she really has is Villanelle, and by a string, from the looks of things. Or is it the other way around?

 

She’s curled on the sofa, poking at her scar with tweezers when Villanelle returns that evening. She’s brought pizza.

Eve shoves her shirt down, eyebrows raising at the blood smeared all over her floral jumpsuit.

Villanelle grimaces theatrically at her. “They sent me a wriggler.”

 _Fucking hell_.

“What happened?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she stretches her neck from side to side warily, mumbles, “I hope nobody leaves a dead horse in my bed. I need to get clean.” Eve watches her toss a bag by her feet before making a show of taking her clothes off.

“ _Must_ you?”

“You don’t like my body?”

“Don’t.”

“I have been working hard on my tan,” Villanelle places a hand on her cocked hip, “you should tell me it looks nice.” She tugs on her ponytail, so her hair comes loose in soft waves across her bare shoulders.

Eve rolls her eyes. Her insides summersault.

Villanelle preens, and then - “ _Oh_. You haven’t seen it yet. _Oops._ ”

“What?”

Villanelle covers her stomach before Eve can let her hungry curiosity get the best of her.

“I will show you mine, if you show me yours, okay? But first - _bath_.”

 

The cardboard box lays empty on the coffee table. It had been the best pizza of Eve’s life.

They sit silent on the sofa, reflected on the black screen of the TV. Eve looks at it like she would a painting. Her hair sits wild around her, back straight, hands in her lap. Villanelle spreads out beside her - one foot is on the table, the other tucked underneath her.

They are opposites. They differ, Eve tells herself.

She watches Villanelle turn, rubbing her belly through the maroon silk of her pyjamas.

“So.”

Eve hums.

“Can I see it?”

Her heart thuds. It starts to jackhammer in her stomach like a rabbit’s. She can see it pound beneath her cotton t-shirt.

“No.”

Villanelle pouts childishly, swivelling in her seat to face her. “Please?”

“Villanelle - ”

“Come _on_ , Eve. Pretty please? I will show you mine. I know you want to see it.”

“Where are your scissors?”

When Villanelle realises Eve’s not going to budge, she whines.

“Ugh, _fine_.”

She skulks to the bathroom, returning with a small, surgical scalpel and alcohol rub. She rolls the scalpel between thumb and forefinger before tutting. “No funny business, okay?”

Eve shrugs. She takes it in her own hands, trembling as they move to the hem of her top. Villanelle is looking at her intently, like she would a kill. Her eyes are hooded, tongue darting to wet her mouth.

She should find it morbid and yet the focussed, clear way Villanelle stares, reaches down within her and plucks at strings somewhere in her depths, low and resonant. She warms with the attention, and then with shame and resentment. She wonders if Villanelle seeing it would instil in her some semblance of guilt.

“You first.”

“Sure,” Villanelle agrees easily, lifting her camisole to just beneath her breasts. She grins, proud.

The scar is there. A quick, neat line. Eve didn’t know what she’d expected.

In her dreams, it had always been a gaping hole, fleshy and bottomless like a rotting flower, threatening to swallow her whole.

She reaches to touch it. Villanelle lets her.

The skin beneath her hand is soft, _human._ Villanelle’s all sinew and muscle, why wouldn’t she be? She ripples under Eve’s touch and Eve presses a tentative thumb over her navel, over the wound, stretching to stroke the underside of her ribs.

She _did that._

She listens to Villanelle’s quiet breathing. Palms the thump of her heart, the gentle prickle of her skin as it turns to gooseflesh. She doesn’t dare look up, cautious of what she might find written on her face.

Her hand drops, squeezing into a fist instead. Villanelle’s fingers cover it.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

 _Too bad_ , Eve wants to say. She mulls the sandpaper edges of it over in her mouth and then goes with, “I regret ever giving it to you. All the time.”

Villanelle scoots closer to her. “I like it,” she whispers. “Are you going to show me yours?”

Eve takes a hearty swallow. Anchors her lip between her teeth.

She’d dreamt of this for so long. In Niko’s arms, she’d woken up night after night, riddled with a chilled sweat, the acrid scent of Villanelle’s blood clinging to her subconscious, the firm, wrestling pressure of her body ever-present between her thighs, the helpless sounds she’d made, an echo. In Mattia’s bed, she’d hallucinated Villanelle reaching inside her with clenched fists to search for the bullet and those fists had turned so easily to fingers and a mouth, teeth snapping at her, down, down, down.

Eve shudders and scrunches her t-shirt. It comes away in fistfuls.

She doesn’t see the gasp coming.

“ _Ooh_. That is… _bad_.”

“Fuck you.”

“No – I mean, it _is_ my fault. Fuck, Eve. It wasn’t meant to – look like _that_ ,” she cringes, following the jagged line with her eyes as they flicker between it and Eve’s face. “You look like an angry toddler scribbled on you with - ”

“You _shot_ me.”

“Is there one at the back?”

Eve turns to show her the rest. This time, Villanelle touches her, right over her flank and down her spine, tracing over the thickened skin there tenderly. Eve leans into it, a little. When was the last time somebody had touched her like that?

When she’s finished, Villanelle takes great care to help lay her against the backrest.

“Maybe you can say it was – a shark attack? I will help you come up with a good story.”

Something in her plummets. She sighs. “Is everything a joke to you?”

“No. I am not joking. This time.”

“It hurt. You _really_ hurt me _._ ”

Villanelle catches the meaning in its entirety because the tightness around her mouth dissolves, chin tilting down mournfully.

“You hurt _me_.”

That hot, tight feeling is back. The one that had kept Eve up in hospital, the one Carolyn had instilled in her, and then Villanelle. “You betrayed me.”

“You were going to leave!”

“So why didn’t you let me?”

“Because - ”

“You _lied_ to me.”

“I was trying to keep you safe -”

“ _Bullshit._ ”

“I wanted to help you, I told you, I - ”

“ _Don’t._ Don’t say it.” Eve pushes off the sofa so she can scoot away from Villanelle’s heat, the unbearable look in her eyes. When the distance isn’t enough, she rises to pace in front of the TV.

“You belong to me!”

Eve’s head snaps up. The words explode inside her like a firework. This cannot be happening again.

“Are you _kidding_ me? Did you not get it the first time?  I’m not _yours_ , _Oksana_ ,” she shouts, pointing the scalpel in Villanelle’s direction, “You don’t own me! I’m not a toy you can collect and then toss out, I’m not a fucking _thing_ ,” she growls. “You _used_ me. You know what Konstantin told me? _‘She’ll love you to death.’_ Isn’t that right? He would know. And Anna? He was completely right, _God,_ I was so s _tupid_!”

When Villanelle stands to come towards her, Eve sobs.

“Don’t. Stay away from me. Don’t _touch_ me.”

“Eve, you’re going to hurt yourself - ”

“ _Yeah?_ ” she yanks the scalpel up to her neck defiantly, stopping Villanelle in her tracks.

“Eve.”

The blade stings against her throat. One flick, that’s all she’d need. Maybe it would be worth it, just to see Villanelle break. She pushes harder.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I _would._ ”

“Eve,” Villanelle’s voice shakes. She takes a tentative step forward. Her eyes are wet and desperate, Eve sees them as she gets closer. “I will not touch you. I promise. Just - You are the only thing I - ”

“Can’t have.”

“Sure. Put the scalpel down. Please.”

“I’m not yours.”

“Okay.”

Eve lets her arm relax slightly. Her muscles ache. She studies Villanelle, the silhouette of her fly-aways making her look younger, the sad curve of her parted mouth, the glisten of her waterline like a punch to the gut. The hatred inside her loosens.

She takes a wet, jagged breath.

“You need to understand something.”

Villanelle nods. Reaches for her hopefully, but hovers at her wrist. “Okay.”

“You will _never_ have me.” She wants to say, _You can’t love me and possess me,_ but the words tangle in her mouth, too heavy and too sour and too soon.

She watches Villanelle deflate like a scorned child, her eyes falling shamefully as her chin wobbles. There is a long moment where Eve wonders if Villanelle might turn again, a constant game of Jackyll-Hyde to keep them on each other’s paths. But Villanelle remains lax, fingers curling in the silk of her top.

“I won’t take what you will not give me.”

Eve knows she’s being manipulated. Cajoled, practically, into a pity party. Except all she sees is genuine, heart-stopping anguish written all over Villanelle’s slender frame and boy, does it make her feel like a total asshole.

She hands over the scalpel. Allows Villanelle to place it face down on the coffee table with a click. Allows herself a long, trembling, exhausted sigh and lets her arms fall to her sides with a loud slap.

“Will you show me how to get the stitches out?”

Villanelle revives a little, finally, licking her lips and giving a quick nod.

“Of course.”

 

The next few days pass in a state of limbo. Villanelle is brooding and withdrawn. Doesn’t tease Eve or poke at her. Occasionally disappears to complete a job or bring back food with little interaction in between.

The time they do share is fraught, stretched tight like rubber. Villanelle spends hours in the garden, tending to her flowers whilst Eve takes naps in the shade.

One afternoon, she’s woken by the sporadic sounds of the piano.

Villanelle had been playing more – usually whilst Eve was in the bath or otherwise occupied - perching herself on the stool, chin resting on one bent knee as she’d let her fingers run singlehandedly over the keys.

Today she plays with both hands. Something melancholy that Eve doesn’t recognise but it stirs a whole lot within her.

She makes her way inside, hovering by the garden doors.

The music stops.

Villanelle looks up at her. “Did I wake you?” They’re the first words of the day and they come out soft and concerned.

Eve shakes her head, shoving her hands into the pockets of her shorts. “What were you playing?”

“Debussy.”

“It’s nice,” she steps carefully inside and tilts her head to look at the sheet music. It’s scrawled in black patterns that look like hieroglyphics. There are annotations in pencil, indicating that Villanelle had taken time to study them. “May I listen?”

It seems almost too personal, like Villanelle’s trying to communicate to her through melody instead of conversation, hoping it will light up the dark spaces they’d both created.

“Sure.”

Eve prepares to sit on the sofa, surprised when Villanelle scoots up on the piano stool to make room for her. She perches nervously.

The piece starts off slow. It reminds Eve of trickling water, swelling gradually, winding and dipping in sinister, aching patterns. She stares at Villanelle’s hands for a long time, focussed on the wide span of her delicate fingers, the stillness of her wrists. Occasionally, their elbows touch when Villanelle uses the whole length of the keyboard.

She plays beautifully. She plays with a humanity that Eve had only seen in glimpses. It makes her wish she could ask her all about it – why Debussy? What does she feel when she plays? What does she think about?

Instead, she closes her eyes and lets herself fall into the journey. She’d dabbled in the violin as a child, a result of her walking-stereotype Korean parents – up to Grade 1 only, stubbornly, as far as she can remember. It hadn’t moved her the way this does.

She lets the piece carry her until Villanelle stops midway to turn the page and Eve is forced to look over at her face.

“You could teach me.”

Villanelle looks back, amused.

“When to turn the page, I mean,” Eve laughs.

“I could.”

“Oksana,” she whispers. It seems appropriate - to call her that in this moment.

There is no angry snarl. No rebuttal.

Only Villanelle, sitting beside her, waiting patiently.

“Where did you learn that?”

For a moment, Eve thinks she’s just going to continue to play, the door to her past kept firmly and irrefutably shut.

But Villanelle takes her left hand away and strokes the keys with her right only, peppering her words with the leitmotif.

“Anna. She had a piano - a Steinway, like this one. She would invite me to her house – after school, or on Saturdays, sometimes,” she frowns at the memory.

Eve hums. She doesn’t move a muscle.

“She would make me read out loud in French – to practise. I used to get in fights, _all_ of the time, so she would take me home. Every time, she would take me home. Clean my face. And then she would make me sit and she would play _Voiles,_ _R _ê_ verie_. That one was her favourite. Sometimes she would put on a recording of it – it would play, when we - ” her fingers stutter for a second, tripping over a chromatic before continuing. “You know she tried to take me to the opera? I _hated_ it – it was _so_ _boring_ -”

Eve smiles gently, picturing a fifteen-year-old Villanelle in jeans and trainers, sulking in the middle of an aria.

“- but this is different.”

“So, she used to teach you?”

“Sure.” And then Villanelle’s mouth tightens, sombre but undeniably pleased. “Until I castrated her husband.”


	4. Chapter 4

//

 

Villanelle comes to her three nights later.

She comes when the moon is fat and round and silver on her skin.

It hadn’t let Eve sleep. She rolls onto her back and watches the lingering silhouette at the threshold to the room.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.”

Eve frowns, propping herself on an elbow to take a better look. The first thing she does, guiltily, is check Villanelle for weapons. She wears new silk pyjamas – men’s, black and buttoned to the top, hair ruffled from laying down, feet bare on the tiles. She looks smaller than Eve is used to. Her movements are slow, lazy.

“What’s wrong?”

Villanelle shrugs. “Can’t sleep.”

“Oh.” She rubs her eyes, then sits up completely. “Do you want to swap? Sorry – I should’ve offered from the start. I didn’t mean to hijack your bed.” She moves to pull the covers off herself, but Villanelle shakes her head, stepping further inside.

“No. The couch is – excellent. It’s a Terence Conran,” she boasts. Eve gives a short, tired laugh. “I wanted to know - ”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want to go for a drive tomorrow? It might help. I will take you on a walk.”

Eve cocks her head to the side to try and decipher her.

“You came here, in the middle of the night, to ask me to go for a drive tomorrow?”

“I like to be prepared.”

She hums knowingly, a little smug at the way Villanelle fidgets in her spot under the attention. She pretends to think for a moment. The answer is yes, naturally. Being cooped up on two acres of land hadn’t entirely been her first choice. Or fifth. But leaving Villanelle suspended is too satisfying, if only for a few minutes.

“A drive sounds good.”

“Okay. Great. Good night, Eve.”

“Oksana?”

Villanelle is all too eager to turn. Her soft eyes shine amongst the shadows. Eve feels them penetrate right through her like a physical touch, both terrifying and magnetic. Briefly, she wonders if she’s making the wrong choice, if it’s going to unfurl and slap her tight across the face, quick to climb to the top of her list of stupid shit she’s done this month and yet-

“Do you want to stay here?”

“What?”

“With me. In the bed.”

“ _Eve_.” A scandalised, comical look settles on Villanelle’s face.

“To sleep,” she warns, grateful when Villanelle pads towards her and hovers beside the bed, suspicious.

“And here I was, thinking you were going to take advantage of me.”

“Asshole.”

“No,” she drawls, “ _you_ are the one propositioning _me_.” As she moves to slip beneath the covers, she looks at Eve carefully, serious. “Are you sure?”

To be honest, Eve isn’t. But they’d come this far, hadn’t they? What’s another trip to the vet?

She asks anyway. “Are you going to hurt me?”

Villanelle shakes her head, holding up her hands in surrender. “I am unarmed.”

Eve scoots to her side of the bed to make room. Watches as Villanelle settles down, bringing the covers right up to her chin. She looks at the ceiling for a long time, contemplative.

And finally, when Eve can't quite bring herself to say another word, Villanelle rolls away, widening the space between them.

 

They drive down through Naples to the Amalfi coast. Eve spends the entire journey soaking up the lines of Villanelle’s profile to the sound of 80s classics blaring from the radio. Despite living together, despite everything that had happened in the time since that bathroom meet, Eve hadn’t ever felt safe or unrushed enough to just sit, and look.

She knows Villanelle likes it. Waiting to be showered with compliments.

But Eve doesn’t give her one. Only occupies the passenger seat, distantly aware that should Villanelle decide, the car could crash at any time – a sick, devastating end for them both. Still, she indulges, slightly on edge, like a tourist watching a sedate tiger. Except Villanelle is much more beautiful, and much more dangerous.

She has exactly three freckles, scattered at the corner of her left eye. Eve can see them in the opposite rear-view mirror.

Her irises are green today, though Eve’s used to seeing them darker.

She’s sweaty – soft curls stick to the nape of her neck, coiling and uncoiling with the summer wind.

And she smells good. Like wildflowers and gelato, which they’d had in bed, for breakfast.

Eve closes her eyes and sucks in a deep, greedy breath.

 

Villanelle takes her to _Sensi_.

They’re shown to the balcony and Eve feels incredibly underdressed as soon as she's seated. The Italian women around her smell like Chanel and cigarettes, lips as red as their nails as red as their dresses, in gorgeous floral prints of blood orange and fuscia pink and Eve wonders how Villanelle can just sit there, one arm flung across the balcony railing, military boots tapping on the tiled floor.

“Can we go somewhere else?” She’s beginning to sweat. Again. The sun pounds directly into her eyes and leaves her cranky and dehydrated.

“Why?”

“I really don’t think this kind of place - ”

But Villanelle knows the owner, of course she does, because he’s greeting her and they’re speaking in delicious, melodic Italian and Eve can only stare at Villanelle’s mouth as she goes through the menu and orders for them.

When they’re alone again, Villanelle grins.

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay, fine,” she folds arms over her chest. “Is this you trying to impress me?”

Villanelle leans forward delightedly, splaying her long fingers over the crisp, white tablecloth.

“Well, Eve. You took me to bed before you took me to dinner. I am just trying to do things the old-fashioned way.”

Eve laughs. A big, belly-deep laugh she doesn’t expect at all. The first one in weeks.

“Do you ever stop?”

“Flirting? _Nope_ ,” the _p_ pops and Eve feels Villanelle’s eyes run over her bared arms, almost exaggeratedly so, a mischievous glint behind them. “Does it bother you?”

The waiter brings two glasses of regional white and starters, and Eve welcomes the interruption, relieved.

It does bother her, yes. In the way an itch might bother her - one she’s dying to get to but can’t quite reach.

Villanelle scoops up a fresh oyster. Looks at her over its rim with hooded eyes and God, it shouldn’t cause such a reaction in her, it should make her feel irritated and done, but it leaves her exposed and vulnerable and _seen_ , and she grabs for her glass, draining its contents in three quick gulps, just so she doesn’t have to watch Villanelle scandalise the rest of the patrons.

 

She regrets it the moment she steps foot onto the trail.

The hike up is excruciating. Villanelle, to her credit, waits for her at every turn and offers to stay in charge of the heavy backpack.

She is incredibly fit. Eve had no doubts, but without her to slow things down, she figures Villanelle could sprint all the way to the top.

Her wound makes things difficult. It pulls so tight she thinks it might tear completely open now that there’s nothing holding it together. She checks on it every couple of minutes, grateful each time her fingers come away sweaty but unbloodied.

She’s wheezy. Her lungs hurt from working hard to keep her alive, legs creaking in their joints. She knows there's a sunburn starting to form on the tops of her shoulders.

Still, she’s grateful to get out.

And for the change of scenery.

The cliffs move slowly into view for her, luscious and rugged as they rise above the coastline. Where the boxy houses cluster, the water comes away peppered with yachts on aquamarine, swimming into indigo further out. Eve wants to jump right in, let the ocean swallow her whole.

She must wear a stupid look on her face, because Villanelle laughs, offering her the flask.

She takes long, clumsy gulps, then slumps onto a rock.

“This is – insane.”

“Do you like it?”

Eve nods, letting her eyes soak up all the glorious colour. She rates herself a seasoned traveller - she likes to think anyone looking to work for MI6 would. In their early years, back when it had felt like less of a slog and more of an adventure, Niko had taken her all over Europe and then backpacking across the Far East. They’d climbed the Eiffel Tour, Gaudi’s creations, the Alps, the Shard; swum on rooftop infinity pools, ridden elephants and learned to dive, dodged a mugging and a stolen moped, bungeed over the Great Barrier Reef.

She certainly had a good kaleidoscope of memories.

But this. The tranquillity of it. The absolute quiet after weeks spent inside her own head. The fact that Villanelle lets her enjoy it at her own pace, never pushing, never interrupting. She turns to find Villanelle already looking back at her.

“Yes,” she breathes reverently. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome.”

They sit in silence for the better part of an hour. The only sound is the squawk of seagulls and then the rustle of a wrapper as Villanelle splits an energy bar with her.

With a full mouth, Villanelle finally asks, “What do you think about? When you go quiet, like that.”

Eve considers it.

“A lot.”

“Tell me?”

She replays that monologue she’d gifted Villanelle in Paris. She still thinks about those things, but it’s those things and more. Things that make her feel too empty and too full, like now, bursting at the seams until she thinks she might spill herself all over the cliff face.

“I think about how the hell we ended up here.”

“We hiked.”

Eve rolls her eyes. Gives Villanelle a deadpan look.

“Sorry, I am all ears.” Her accent buffers the words, and the turn of phrase sits thick and clumsy in her mouth. Eve finds herself endeared by it.

“I think about,” she takes a deep breath, “I think about Raymond. I think about him constantly. About the blood, _God_ , so much of it, _everywhere._ How wet it felt. How - ” she swallows, “it _smelt_. I can feel it on me, still, all the time. I think about his family. He has _children_.” She runs a nervous hand through her hair.

Villanelle leans back, crossing her ankles.

“I think about that look in your eyes, his fingers around your neck. You looked so - ” _Scared._ Was that the right word? “And then I - I _took a life_. I _killed_ another person. It felt so easy and so hard and so…quick. He was just, there. And then he wasn’t. I can’t stop staring at my hands – like they’re not mine. I keep hearing that sound, the disgusting _squelch_ of the axe - And then his body hit the floor, and I – dream about it, I dream it over and over on a loop, when does it ever stop?”

Villanelle shrugs. “I don’t dream about these things.”

Of course not. Eve squeezes her eyes shut, rubbing her open palms over her face. “Lucky you.”

“Eve. He was a bad man.”

“It wasn’t my call to make.”

“He was going to kill me.”

Eve bristles. If she’s not careful, she’s going to sink into another sulk and she absolutely wouldn’t be able to make it back down the cliff by herself. No point beating a dead horse.

“If it bothered you so much, why didn’t you just let him do it?”

“I don’t know.” Eve watches Villanelle straighten a little, stretching arrogantly under the sun.

“It’s because you care about me.”

Yes, Eve thinks. “That’s strong word choice.”

Villanelle splits into a grin. It’s so big and radiant and incredibly annoying.

“You let me take care of you.”

Had there been an alternative?

“You let me sleep in your bed.”

“ _Your_ bed.”

“Eve?”

Eve stares at her wordlessly. She feels tired. She’s felt tired for the better part of a year, a bone-deep heaviness that she can’t shake, like vines taking permanent root in the deepest parts of her to suck her dry.

“What I said – right before I shot you - ”

That’s something Eve hoped she’d never hear. It sounds almost laughable now. She swipes stray curls away from her eyes, tilting to see Villanelle better, out of the sun.

Villanelle leans towards her. “When I’m with you…”

Eve raises her brows curiously. She thinks Villanelle is going to say something illuminating, profound, from the sober look in her eyes. But she puffs out her cheeks in frustration and stares back at the coast.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know…?”

“I know it wasn’t the best timing.”

“To what? Shoot me?” she snaps. Then Villanelle looks at her and her irises are so green, the bridge of her nose pink and sweet and freckled and Eve instantly regrets her tone.

“I didn’t want to kill you.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good.”

“I just wanted you to - ” Villanelle sighs, shrugging her shoulders as she toys with her nailbed. “To stop running from me. To let me – I don’t know.”

“Let you what?” Eve prompts gently.

“To let me be with you. Instead of chasing, _all of the time_ , running like you fear me. I don’t want you to be - ”

Eve laughs flatly. “I’m not. Trust me. Not anymore.”

“I know.”

Villanelle takes a small rock and tosses it over the cliff edge, and then another, and another. She stares at the waves for a long time, chin resting on her knee. Eve lets her do it, counting seven throws before she’s itching for an answer.

“When you’re with me, you what?” There is no response, so she continues. “You feel things.”

Villanelle nods.

“Which things?”

“I don’t know. Big, important things. I already _told_ you, but you said no.”

Getting answers from Villanelle feels like pulling teeth. Eve pictures herself as a dentist, trying to reel the information out, one foot on the extraction chair, two hands on the forceps. She could be doing better.

“You said you loved me.”

“I _do_.”

 _No, you don’t. You don’t hurt the people you love; you don’t shoot_ _them_ , Eve clenches her jaw so the words stay put. After all, she had hurt Niko. Kenny. Elena. Hugo. People who cared about her, who she loved in one form or another.

“And what does that mean to you?”

Villanelle looks at her carefully. “It means…that I don’t want to hurt you. I _never_ wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to - know you, I wanted you to see me -” and then softly, “- to understand me. I thought you would be the only one to understand me.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

“I know. I thought if I could buy some time, it would work and we would be happy, it would be _normal_.”

“You could have…I don’t know, asked?”

Villanelle’s eyes flash. “And you are telling me you would say yes.”

Eve clicks her tongue. “Probably not.”

“You know - I worry about you. Only you. And Konstantin. But if something happened to you,” her voice shakes and Eve watches her take a long swallow, swiping her hand through the dust distractedly. “I just want to keep you safe - ” Villanelle cringes, “Obviously you can do that all by yourself. _Clearly._ ” A short, bittersweet smile. “But when you are not around, it _hurts._ I think about you and I wonder if you think about me and I miss you. I want to know what you are doing. I want to see you. I want to keep you with me.”

The words are blunt and practical, but they burn themselves into Eve’s forebrain and they shouldn’t fill her with nervous energy, but they do, and she shifts in her seat so she can place a soft hand against Villanelle’s foot.

“You can’t own me and love me.”

Villanelle nods, chewing her lips between her teeth.

“That’s not how it works. You can’t trap me, expecting me to thank you for it. Loving isn’t taking.”

“But I want things. With you. I want you.”

Eve stares at her mouth as she says it. It comes with such petulant openness, a helplessness that hurtles right behind Eve’s breastbone and then drops into the pit of her stomach.

_I want you. I want you. I want you._

She replays it greedily. Gives Villanelle’s calf a gentle squeeze and steels herself for words she’s going to regret. Just to hurt her one more time. Just to see how far she can push, how far it could really go. Then they’ll be even.

“But sometimes we can’t have the things we want.”

 

It’s night-time when they arrive home. Villanelle is out of the car before Eve’s managed to open her eyes, bleary and a little travel-sick from the winding country roads.

There’s a blanket placed over her. When she sits up, a cardigan falls into her lap from where it had been wedged between her head and the window.

She shrinks in her seat. _Oh god._

She gets out of the car, realising that the driver’s door has been left open. Before she’s even half-way up the path to ask her about it, Villanelle’s barraging past, duffel bag slung over her shoulder, eyes fixed firmly on her boots.

Eve’s jaw drops.

“Oksana - ”

“I have to go. The couch is _really shitty._ ”

Eve jogs after her clumsily, watches as Villanelle throws her carryon across the back seat and slides behind the wheel. She doesn’t roll the window down.

Eve raps frantically on it. Decides to shout instead.

She wants to say, _What the fuck are you doing? Also, I thought you said it was a Terence Conran?_ childishly, just to spite her and then, more importantly, _You don’t even fucking sleep there anymore?_

Instead, she scrambles to open the door, but it’s locked and Villanelle’s staring blankly ahead as she yells, “I’m sorry! Okay? I’m sorry!”

The words trip out before she can stop them, they’d been dying to come out since London, since Paris, since Bristol. _I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I’m always such an asshole._

The engine turns on.

Eve jumps away before she ends up beneath the tyres. From Villanelle’s face, she only catches a glimpse of her eyes as the car goes in reverse. She searches for the hatred there, the burbling wrath, but doesn't find either.


	5. Chapter 5

// **  
**

 

The TV stays on constantly. Mostly to fill the empty, suffocating space Villanelle had left, and so Eve doesn’t go out of her mind.

News reporters ramble on at her in Italian, but she gets the gist.

Four new murders. Scattered all over Italy. Spread over mere days.

There's something lacklustre about them - an after-thought - brutal and ruthless and shown in way more detail than Eve’s used to getting from the BBC.

She stares at the screen for a long time. The bodies stare back at her. Vaguely, as if through fog, Eve remembers she should probably feel disgusted.

But all she feels is empty and lonely and sad.

 

There’s a knock at the door almost a fortnight later. It runs through her like lightning, until she realises Villanelle has a key so it couldn’t be her.

Still, who else knows of her location? Over a month being cooped up – Eve can tell, because her summer evenings have shortened, and she’s begun to spend them in cardigans – and she thinks she might be developing Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe it’s the sullen serenity of the Italian countryside that makes her want to drown in self-loathing for ever.

The knock comes again, brash and masculine and Eve jolts, dodging away from the windows.

“ _Eve_ _!_  Open the goddamn door.”

She recognises the voice. Her legs feel like they might sweep from under her.

She leaps for the door before they can, throwing it open to find a familiar smile cocked at her, a burly body leaning against the frame.

“Hello.”

“Konstantin.” It comes as a sigh, a breath, and then she’s throwing her arms around his neck and they collide, awkwardly and unprofessionally so she feels nothing but bliss in that moment.

She lets the smell of tobacco and vodka engulf her. She’s mortified at the comfort the scratch of his thick beard brings; how safe she feels in his hug. It’s irrational. It is. But she needs it, she’s needed someone to hold her since that catheter came out.

“How are yo - ”

“What are you doing here?”

Konstantin chuckles, sauntering in before making himself comfortable at the dining table, leather jacket tossed across a chair.

He sprawls. He does it like Villanelle does, ankle over thigh, and there’s a familial quality to it that makes Eve wonder how many of Konstantin’s ticks Villanelle had assimilated over the years.

She watches him. He looks drained. He looks like someone or something sucked the soul from him. 

That makes two of them, then.

She reaches for the drinks cabinet and pours him a generous glass of whiskey.

Seconds later when it’s empty, she settles in front of him and watches as he lights up a cigarette.

“How did you find me?

“She told me where you were.”

Eve stiffens in her chair. “Where is she?”

He shakes his head, blowing smoke over his shoulder, fingers rubbing against his jaw and then over his balding head and face. He’s wearing a bright shirt straight from the early 90s. It sits stark and garish against his greying eyes. Eve tries to catch them but Konstantin stares, dazed, into middle distance until the end of his cigarette starts to crumble.

“Konstantin.”

“Yeah.”

“When’s the last time you slept?”

He takes a deep breath. Focuses back on her.

“What?”

Eve smiles gently at him. She wants to reach across the table, if only for a moment, to touch him, just a little, to keep him there with her. She’d been so incredibly lonely.

Instead, she reaches for the bottle of whiskey and tops him up once more.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure," Konstantin drums his fingers against the glass. He finishes the second drink, letting his cigarette drop between the ice cubes. It hisses as it dies.

“Are you hungry?”

“I had a coffee for breakfast. ”

It’s very late afternoon. Eve hadn’t been so good at eating herself, or keeping track of time, for that matter, the days droning on in one drab, monotonous blur. She’d mostly kept herself grazing in between long periods of sulking in bed or staring aimlessly at the TV.

On Villanelle’s departure, she’d taken the sun with her. The thought alone had sounded so pathetic at first, Eve could do nothing but feel nauseated at the cliché of it, sneering beneath her bedsheets at the annoying drip-drop of the shutters.

And then it had continued to rain and rain and rain, and Eve had migrated to the couch in a state of half-sleep and half-fantasy, teleporting herself back to London as the storm continued to rage.

She pictured Villanelle with her in Covent Garden, ducking out of a blizzard to sneak free samples from Whittard’s; pictured them at St Kat’s Docks, watching, over red wine, as the rain drenched the docked yachts; pictured them curled up on a velvet sofa of Villanelle’s hotel room, cast in shadows and drowned in thunder.

She tells Konstantin about it over scrambled eggs and sausage – a breakfast-for-dinner combo Villanelle had sworn by.

It all comes out – more quickly than she’d expected, in one sudden, uninterrupted rush, as if Konstantin had finally stumbled on her overflowing self and decided to pull the plug.

She tells him about what happened in Tivoli, the recovery afterwards, the days spent with Villanelle, the nights.

She tells him about the piano and the hike and the things Villanelle had told her.

He listens to it all, quiet and interested, like a big, white, Russian bear perched in the middle of her kitchen.

When she finishes, she slumps in her chair with the effort of it. The ground could swallow her up and she’d thank it. She waits for Konstantin to berate her for growing attached despite his advice, but he tugs the box of Camels from his shirt pocket and hands her one sympathetically.

She shouldn’t. Hugo had been a bad enough influence, leading her straight back to her college days.

She does though. The nicotine warms her instantly, burns her from the inside out. She takes long, deep drags, letting herself cough through the haze.

“Fuck.”

Konstantin smiles. He watches her for long moments, gaze glinting knowingly, tight lines gathering at the corners of his eyes and between his brows to let Eve know something’s wrong.

She licks her lips. “You’re worried.”

“Sure. A little.”

“About her.”

“You have been watching the news?”

Eve runs both hands through her hair before nodding awkwardly, chin coming to rest in her palm. “Is it her?”

“She has been taking jobs.  _Stress relief._  She will have the country cleaned up by the end of the month. Not her best work.”

Eve blanches. He makes it sound like child’s play. The thought of Villanelle slipping up because of her, one careless kill too many, one emotionally unhinged murder-spree, one day with her in the world and then the next without, curdles unpleasantly inside her and she shudders.

“Has she – Have you heard from her recently?”

Konstantin hums but doesn’t elaborate. They sit, listening to the white noise of the rain until it’s too much for Eve and she takes another cigarette.

He leans to her, arms folding against the table. “What did you do to her?”

“What do you mean?” she inhales the nicotine shakily, blowing out fast.

“She came one night; she came to my apartment in Rome. She looked - ” he sighs, “she didn’t look like herself. She had this –  _sadness_ , you know? Like someone shot her dog. It happened once – in Amsterdam. You didn’t come, and she just - ”

It dawns on her. Was she meant to come? She hadn’t come. Villanelle had waited for her and she hadn’t come.

“She just?”

“Lost her head.” He doesn’t elaborate. Part of Eve’s glad for it, glad that Villanelle has someone looking out for her, someone to hold her secrets for her. Mostly though, she wants to know exactly what those words mean and exactly how they had manifested.

She swallows.

“Do you think she’s coming back?”

Konstantin shrugs again. Eve had, quickly over months of knowing him, learned that he could be a man of very few words under trying circumstances, an enigma to rival Villanelle.

He reaches for the inside pocket of his jacket and spreads the contents onto the table: a passport, a burner phone and a thick stack of cash.

“She told me to give you this. If you want to get out.”

“To London?”

"Anywhere you want." He shifts slowly, the mountainous bulk of him rising from the chair to get dressed. Eve stares at the passport for a long time – a different name, a different date of birth, a second chance for a way out of this entire mess – and only moves to escort Konstantin once he’s already at the door.

“Thank you for dinner. The sausage was - ” he kisses his fingers in a very Italian gesture that Eve accepts graciously, “like my mother used to make.”

“Honey, right? That’s the secret ingredient.”

“Sure.” He turns to leave, tugging up the collar of his jacket against the wet wind. “Eve?”

“Yeah.”

“I think this is different.”

She frowns.

“She seems different. Not like with Anna.”

The words linger between them, swollen with meaning. They make her want to offer for him to stay, for the night, for a few days, for long enough to tell her Villanelle’s story cover to cover instead of drip-feeding her, and never enough. She wants to know it all.

Konstantin steps out into the rain.

“Is it a good different?” she hurries.

He squints against the sheets of rain, hands wedged into the pockets of his coat. “You will have to figure that one out for yourself. She doesn’t tell me everything.”

And then his car is reversing and Eve’s left soaking on the doorstep, heart bounding in her chest, his words resonant within her long after he’s gone.

 

She lays in bed for hours. If she concentrates hard enough, she can still smell Villanelle on the sheets – she hadn’t washed them. She buries her face into the pillow next to hers and battles the urge to strip the bed, just so she doesn’t have to suffer like this.

What the hell was she doing?

The covers smells of perfume and something hot and dark, like wet jasmine.

She kicks out onto her back, slapping the mattress with open, frustrated palms. Thoughts of Villanelle creep in, always at the midnight hour, clawing at the glass walls of her mind in gentle tap-taps until she’s cracking and thinking of nothing else. Wondering where Villanelle is, how she’s feeling, who she’s killing, if she’s lonely, who she’s holding, whether there’s another body beside her, whether she’s coming home.

Eve closes her eyes and remembers the way it felt, to have Villanelle lay next to her. The quiet, heavy intensity of it. She imagines it now, raindrop shadows racing over Villanelle’s bare back, her fingers playing catch-up.

She reaches for her phone and clicks through the contacts, hoping.

Against the luminescent screen, only Konstantin’s name appears.

 

Her phone buzzes against her chest one morning, at quarter to four.

She scrambles for it, her arms taking long moments to come to life, fingertips tingling as the feeling crawls into them.

She’d fallen asleep on the sofa again. The distant sounds of late-night TV filter into her consciousness as she squints blearily at the phone screen.

_Are you still here?_

_Yes. What’s wrong?_

The reply comes minutes later, once she's already swimming in adrenaline and her neck’s prickling with fear and sweat and an electric ache where the cushion had jammed itself into her wound.

_I am coming to you. Don’t move._

Her thumb trembles over the call button. She wants to ring Konstantin, desperately, to ask him if Villanelle’s okay, if something had happened to her. She hopes he would have called her first, had it been a true emergency. Still, she feels her nerves begin to sizzle at the thought that maybe something had gone so horribly wrong that Konstantin thought it best to tell her in person.

She kicks the blankets away and bolts off the couch, staggering to the bathroom to wash her face and then to pack what few belongings she’s amassed - just in case tonight’s the night it all goes to shit.

 

Eve spots the glare of the car lights through the front windows. She’s out of the house before Konstantin’s even stepped out of his rented Fiat.

“What happened?”

He looks downtrodden. Eve had expected him to look frantic or frightened or even angry, but he isn’t. He’s  _exasperated_  and it gives her emotional whiplash. She hurries to him nervously, fists clenching inside her pockets just to have something to hold.

“What are you doing here?” she tries again. She doesn’t recognise her own voice. It shakes and she has to cough to get the kinks out.

“I know it’s late – or early,” he says guiltily, “but – I can’t do it. I have done it one too many times and it can’t happen anymore. My family – I have to worry about them now -  Irina, my wife - And Villanelle, she - ”

Eve stares at him, confused, burning for an explanation.

“I don’t understand. Is everything alright? What happened? Konstantin - ”

Konstantin motions to the back seat of the car.

She steels herself for a corpse but there isn’t one. Only Villanelle, unconscious and tucked in on her side, Konstantin’s jacket covering most of her body.

She blinks hard, her trembling hands coming up against the cool glass of the window, fingers twitching to open the door. Her chest aches so deeply, with relief and dread and something softer, it almost takes her breath away.

“Is she okay?”

Konstantin opens the door for her, reaching in to carefully jostle Villanelle awake. It doesn’t work. She moans at him, whining as he tugs her up like a child and scoops her into his arms.

Eve swallows down her bubbling anxiety. She checks quickly over Villanelle’s drowsy frame, for bruises or blood or both, relieved there are neither.

Villanelle wears a green leather blouse and tight, black sequinned pants, Eve notes, bemused, as she moves to grab Konstantin’s jacket off the back seat. She drapes it over her lap as Konstantin adjusts her in his arms.

“She is  _trouble_. But she will be fine,” he says over the top of Villanelle’s head. It lolls against his shoulder. Her hair is in a loose braid, strands sticking to her flushed cheeks. Her hands curl against Konstantin’s broad chest. Eve wants to reach for her, to be the one to carry her, to grab her and shake her for leaving in the first place.

She follows closely as Konstantin walks into the house, looking around for the best place to deposit the weight in his arms. She motions to the bedroom, jogging after them and turning down the covers so he can tuck Villanelle in.

“Some pain killers. For the head. And water,” he says, eyes not leaving Villanelle as they both watch her bury her face into the pillow, away from the hallway lights.

“What happened to her?”

Konstantin pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut for a few moments, as if telling Eve would break some sacred code, as if he’s embarrassed on Villanelle’s behalf. “She…doesn’t have the best coping mechanism,” he whispers, motioning for them to move to the kitchen so Eve can gather what she needs.

She stares at him by the bar.

“And what mechanism is that?” she shakes her head incredulously, knowing already what Konstantin will tell her.

“I think she is having a bad time,” Konstantin tries. The corners of his mouth turn down and Eve notices the deepening shadows under his eyes. She thaws, empathetic, knowing she has a pair to match, knowing Villanelle had put them there.

“So, she…”

“Blows off some steam?”

Eve slumps onto the bar stool. The clock on the wall fills the silence. It will be sunrise soon.

“Blows off steam,” she parrots flatly. “A little murder here and there, huh.”

Konstantin chuckles but it’s uneasy and helpless, the sound wedging in his throat until his hands are coming up to rub against his beard wearily.  

“So? She decided to celebrate by – getting hammered?”

“Sure. She called me to pick her up from the city,” and then softly, “this time.”

 _This time._  Eve rubs her face tiredly and thinks,  _she should have called me._

“I’ll take care of it.”

“She will probably vomit soon.”  _Christ._  “She is not good at the hangovers – I think some sausage and tomato juice when she wakes up. That one is her favourite. And leave her alone,” his eyes widen, “trust me – it is not worth it. Not until she is back to normal.”

Eve nods. It all feels a bit like a dream, an unbelievable, sardonic hallucination she’s waiting to break free from: she has Villanelle back, incapacitated, bound to be fuming in a few hours, not to mention that Eve herself is running on roughly three hours of sleep.

It was another head-to-head collision waiting to happen.

She gives Konstantin a quick glass of water, knowing he doesn’t intend on staying long.

“I’m sorry to do this to you.”

“You’re not doing anything to me. I’m glad she’s okay.”

“You call if you need, Eve.”

Eve smiles. “For that Bloody Mary recipe? Maybe I will.”

Konstantin loiters at the door, glancing across at the open bedroom door to make sure Villanelle is still in her place. Eve watches him do it and it warms her a little, picturing him with a young Oksana under his wing, constantly piecing together the destruction in her wake, protecting her, teaching her, loving her.

“In Russia, we make it triple vodka, okay? Hair of the dog.”

She scrunches her nose in disgust, feels Konstantin’s large hand pat her shoulder.

“Don’t let her give you any shit.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She realises that Konstantin had never seen the way Villanelle is with her, had been with her lately. She wishes she could tell him. Wonders if Villanelle would shoot her again if he knew the depth of her softness.

“I will message you in the morning – just in case, okay?” He moves to leave but Eve snags his sleeve before he’s out of her sight.

“Konstantin?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“For a ticket to the babysitter club?” his eyes glint, “You are welcome.”

_No, for bringing her back to me._

Eve nods silently, waving him goodbye.

And then she’s alone and day is breaking, and she spends the rest of the morning on the sofa, half-drunk with exhaustion and bone-heavy relief, the TV on mute so she can listen to Villanelle’s quiet snores burble from the room next door.

 


	6. Chapter 6

_Part 6a_

//

 

There’s clattering from the bedroom, then a sudden bang and a long, angry avalanche of Russian.

Eve ignores it, leaning against the stove to focus on stirring the ingredients in her pan. She’d made spicy beef soup: extra mushroom, easy on the garlic – a sick-day recipe past down from her mother and truthfully, the only South Korean dish she’d ever really enjoyed.

She’d cooked it for Niko once. (The fleeting thought of him – only her third in the last two months – pricks like a pin to the foggy cushion of her mind, jarring and unwanted and clingy once it’s there.)

He’d found it too much of  _everything_ , climbing his fingers over his phone in search of the second Indian that week. She thinks on it now – how it had in fact, really said it all; how she should have taken its message for what it was and headed straight for the hills, instead of committing to a decade playing a shadow of herself in a sham of a marriage, how  _I don’t really fancy trying something new tonight_ actually meant,  _I don’t really fancy trying something new ever again._ She feels herself start to burble with anger.

She inhales deeply, the delicious heat flaring inside her and drowning out the rest. The familiar smell fills her with nostalgia. Not for Niko, but for London, though it never quite managed to hold the title of  _home_ in her heart. She missed Connecticut – its obnoxious people, the noise of it, the larger-than-life tips and portion sizes and intersections, the matter-of-factness of it all. London was a different animal altogether – a quiet, calculating sort, one that said one thing but meant another.

She’d learned to navigate the idiosyncrasies and British-isms easily enough. Learned to live with the charcoal-grey claustrophobia that came with the city, absorbed and regurgitated the incessant weather-related chat, acquired the patience to make the perfect cup of tea, got into the habit of cancelling plans at the last minute – a chameleon, an imposter in her own city, though never quite as good as Villanelle.

She thinks she might go back to it. For all its toxicity, it carried most of her life, her memories, the moment she’d met Villanelle and all the moments with her after.

She wonders how much shit she’s truly in. Would Carolyn be waiting for her – this new, murderous version of herself? Would Villanelle come with her?

Italy had been a haven of sorts, despite a rocky start. Italy had allowed her to bury her head in the sand and bask in the luxury of having herself to herself, and Villanelle right beside her.

Italy wasn’t real and it was not forever.

She blinks into the present, hoping to avoid a nose-dive into full blown panic. Her neck already stings, pulse clogged in her throat at the thought of landing in Heathrow with an armada of police cars circling the pick-up area.

The soup is good. It’s so salty and sour and hot, it almost hurts. That’s exactly what she needs.

Eve hums, pleased.

A large pot of herbal tea sits steaming on the kitchen counter.

Once the food is simmering, she slumps onto a bar stool, eyes falling across the marble unit and onto the flickering TV, mug full in her hands.

She’d spent breakfast alone, out in the garden so as not to make too much noise. The sun had been a welcome gift. Eve had longed for it, missed – unbelievably – the sweat it brought, the haziness, the blissful quiet without the rain to rattle her from the inside out.

She takes lazy sips until she’s fully awake and alert enough to message Konstantin and let him know things are okay. 

Villanelle comes out late. Eve watches her emerge mid-afternoon, haggard and half-asleep, face twisted in a grimace as she rubs at it with her hands. When her eyes lift, her scowl deepens.

“Eve?”

Eve smiles carefully. “Hi,” she whispers.

Villanelle mouths a soft  _fuck_  as she pads barefoot across the living room floor. She moves slowly, as if through water, bleary eyes downturned from the sun as her fingers prod at her temples.

She’s wearing a black kimono-style lounge dress painted in burgundy roses to match the ones in the garden, sleeves loose around her elbows, tips of her hair wet as they fall across the bare edges of her tucked-away collar bones. 

Eve would find it romantic - Villanelle, an embodiment of late summer with her honey hair and billowing lines - if it weren’t for her pale, sombre face dodging Eve’s own.

“What are you still doing here?” she grumbles, dropping onto the sofa and burying her head between her knees. “ _Ugh._ ”

“There’s tea…” Eve tries.

“Coffee. I need coffee.”

Except there is no coffee. Eve had worked her way through two bags in Villanelle’s absence, fuelling her insomnia and her anxiety until she’d been reduced to nothing but a mess of caffeinated nerves. She watches Villanelle whine through her hangover, rubbing at her eyes and her growling stomach.

“ _Der'mo_.”

Eve abandons her tea on the counter. She pours a bowl of noodles instead, carrying it over carefully until the sofa dips with her weight and Villanelle’s shoulders tense.

“Here.”

Villanelle peaks at her over a folded forearm, frowning. “No thank you.”

Eve sighs. So, it’s going to be the hard way. That seems fair, she supposes.

“Please?”

“I’m not hungry.”

She places the bowl on the coffee table and rests back on the couch, counting as Villanelle’s ribs rise and fall with her deep, nauseated breaths. She counts five, before Villanelle scoots away from her stubbornly.

“Oksana.”

Villanelle whines again, low and pained. Eve instantly regrets her word choice.  _Oksana_  had become, through no intention of Eve’s, an intimacy in and of itself. It was a secret, a softness, a name Eve called when she felt want, or hurt, or pain, but always something deep and bursting. It was a mantra. And sometimes, it was too much.

“Don’t, Eve. Not now. I can’t, now.”

Eve swallows. She pulls her feet up and wraps arms around her shins, chin coming to rest on her knees. She’s dying to say it all, to release her stream of consciousness like a wild, incoherent scattering of birds.

There had been too much  _waiting_  and  _regret_ and Villanelle was right there, so close Eve could stretch and they would be touching, finally, properly. She gathers the courage to, hand sliding along the cool material of the sofa. All she can think is  _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ She hopes she can prove it with the sole use of her fingertips against Villanelle’s lower back.

But Villanelle’s tilting forward before she can try, sullen as she reaches for the bowl and fork. She sniffs cautiously.

Eve watches her spear a piece of beef and then noodle. There’s a soft, accidental hum of pleasure as her lips touch the bowl to take a sip. The sound settles hot and deep in Eve’s chest. Villanelle glances at her over the rim, making a show of finishing the rest with gargantuan displeasure satirised on her face just to spite her. 

When she’s done, she groans and digs her elbows into her knees, the heels of her palms pushing into her eyes.

Defeated, she stares down at the floor.  “That was excellent.”

Eve smiles.

“There’s more, if you want?”

“No,” Villanelle shakes her head, “I will be sick.”

Eve brings her water and tea and Paracetamol like peace offerings, each one placed carefully on the coffee table, fearful that Villanelle might snap and bite.

Every time she doesn’t, Eve grows a little bolder, daring to broach questions around Villanelle’s time away, but never too probing and always gentle enough to give Villanelle space to ignore, if she so wished.

She doesn't get much at all. No more than  _Rai 1_  had given her. Villanelle projects indifference and an underlying guardedness that Eve knows she’d earned herself after how callous she’d been in Amalfi. 

Still, she’d broken down Villanelle’s barriers before, so what was one more stab at it, so to speak?

The sun soaks them in late-afternoon heat, thawing, a heavy silence between them filled only with the sound of Eve's pounding heart and Villanelle's digesting stomach. Eve eventually makes a bowl for herself, hopeful it might loosen the nerves knotted tight in her chest. She props her feet on the coffee table, the TV flashing in muted colours in front of them.

When Villanelle grows loose and tired, she places her empty plate down and wrings her hands in her lap.

“Want to hear something funny?”

Villanelle’s eyebrows shoot up. The harsh expectancy of it rattles Eve but she powers through, swallowing around the sticky words in her mouth, raw from her spicy broth.

She takes a deep breath. Rehearses the words in her head. Curls her tongue around them clumsily and finally says, “I missed you.” It shakes in her throat.

“Really.”

She curls her nails into her palms until they bite and it hurts. She hums.

“Don’t bullshit me Eve.” Villanelle's words are soft and sore. Eve lifts her eyes to her fallen face.

“I’m not, I - ”

“Why are you still here?”

Eve scrapes her fingers through her hair. She could be in London. She could be in the Bahamas for all anyone cares, on her fourth cocktail of the day, being waited on by some nineteen-year-old pool-boy in nothing but tiny Speedos that accentuate way too much in all the wrong places. She isn’t into it, but somehow, she feels obligated to include him in her childish fantasy. She could be in the Bahamas, but Villanelle wouldn’t be there.

“Because you’re here.”

“Eve.”

She pivots her body so her back presses against the left arm rest and she’s looking at Villanelle face-on, looking at the golden silhouette of her profile, the one she’s memorised down to the freckle.

“I was waiting for you to come back.”

“I didn’t come back,” Villanelle snaps, “Konstantin brought me back.”

“I know,” she says softly, gently toeing the side of Villanelle's hip in a gesture of goodwill. “Oksana.”

The muscles in Villanelle’s jaw flicker. Eve watches her clench and unclench, her eyes fiery, shoulders tight almost all the way up to her ears. She retreats her foot, staring at the empty cushion between them for a long while before sighing sadly.

“I’m sorry.”

There it is. _Finally, honestly_.  So quick and so fucking easy to say and God, Eve wishes she’d said it right from the start instead of being a stubborn asshole.  _Hey Oksana? Sorry I stabbed you. Sorry I hurt you, sorry I chased you, sorry I lied, sorry I let you go, sorry I left, sorry we’re bad for each other –_

Villanelle shrugs, tipping her chin away to stare out at the window.

“What I said – I -" she rubs at the brown buttons on her linen shirt, sweat gathering where the fabric folds at her elbows, “I wanted it to hurt. I wanted you to feel it, but - It came out a little wrong.”

“Which part?” Villanelle bites.

 _All of it._ Eve shakes her head. She sucks her lips into her mouth, pressing them together until they ache against her teeth. “The part about – That last part. About wanting things. About having things."

And then Villanelle’s crossing arms defiantly over her chest but her body’s leaning back – a sign that she’s listening, despite herself.

“What else?”

“And the part –" she cringes, "Before the gun.”

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific, Eve. There are a lot of things you’ve said to me and I am finding it hard to know which part you meant, and which part is bullshit.”

Eve takes a deep, steadying breath. She remembers how she’d felt with Bill when he’d asked her if she liked women, and subsequently made a canon go off in her chest. She’d lied through her teeth then and he hadn’t believed her. She must have gotten better at it because Villanelle does, believes all the words she’d used to build the wall between them, brick by brick.

“Okay,” she nods, gaze steady on the TV as she slumps back to mirror Villanelle’s posture. “When I said I wasn’t scared of anything any more?" she laughs bitterly, "I am. I'd be stupid not to be. But not of – Of different things. To before.”

Villanelle glances at her as if to say,  _that’s not good enough._

“What I mean is - ”

“If you are going to start telling me I am a monster, you can stop. It’s all my fault, yes?”

Eve pulls the tie from her hair. Lets it fall to her shoulders, not missing the way Villanelle's eyes flicker to it briefly, interested. She slides the tie around her wrist and snaps it once, the sting of it a welcome distraction. 

“What I _mean,_ is,” she starts again, “I feel...more myself with you than I’ve ever felt with anyone else and it – scares the shit out of me. You know what that feels like?”

She expects Villanelle to say something flippant, something like _I am not scared of anything,_ but it doesn’t come. Only silence.

“Like I’ve been sleep-walking my whole life and now – Now I’m  _awake_ and everything is  _too much._ ”

Villanelle shifts, impassive but cautious. “What else?”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with it all. I’m a wreck. I haven’t slept. I can’t switch off, everything’s so wrong and so perfect, and I want it all. All of it.”

“What else?”

“You _see_ me – the real me, the me Niko never got, the one Bill - ” Eve's voice cracks, “the one he almost had.” _Bill, Bill, Bill._ “You’re here, like a giant spotlight, and I’m on a stage, naked,” she rasps, the wet sound dragging inside her lungs, “and there's nowhere for me to run.”

“What else?”

“It’s _infuriating_ ," she growls, "and exhausting.” She pulls on the drawstrings of her sweatpants, focussing on rubbing the metal tips together so she doesn’t have to read Villanelle’s expression when she says, “And I never want it to stop.”

Saying those words is like being ejected from a moving airplane, her stomach summersaulting as she hovers mid-air, waiting to see if Villanelle might catch her.

Villanelle blinks, slowly, unmoving and leaves Eve hyperaware of this moment like a freeze-frame: the syncopated swaying of the translucent curtains; the criss-cross pattern of the sun on the wooden floors; the smells, of her cooking and the garden and of Villanelle; the sight of her, calm but bewildered, her eyes tinged with disbelief.  

The distance between them remains but Villanelle slides her hand across, reaching into Eve's lap to pry her fingers from their nervous fidgeting.

When they touch, Villanelle squeezes gently. Eve watches her nod, soft, slow and with complete understanding, looking at her inadequacy and accepting it all.

She scoots a little closer. Eve’s skin prickles where their elbows touch. She thinks Villanelle might lean to rest her head on her shoulder.

Instead, Villanelle looks at her, giddy as she asks, “Eve?”

Her green eyes shine so bright and so near, Eve can see her dumbfounded reflection in the irises.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to watch a movie with me?”

Eve sniffs, a short, shaky breath staggering out as Villanelle stares at her curiously.

“God, yes.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

_Part 6b_

//

 

Eve lets her fingers slide gently over the ends of Villanelle's hair as it fans out across her lap.

Villanelle had started off whole-heartedly focussed on the screen, and then her eyelids had slowly begun to droop minutes later, head lulling and jerking to let Eve know she was fighting sleep but determined to stay fully present and bask in the bliss of their shared space.

Gradually, she’d moved further in, bringing with her that floral scent Eve thought about so often, the warmth of her body heavy and welcome as it rested against Eve's own.

It had been quick, after that. An ‘ _I am hung over, Eve’_ and an exaggerated pout had Eve making space for her to settle in her lap, hands tucked under her chin, cheek pressed firm against the soft cotton of Eve's sweats as Eve's hands lingered, hovering just above the dark, loose sleeve of her dress.

"Will you stroke my hair?"

Eve had laughed then. "Are you serious?"

"Please? It feels good."

She’d wanted to know who else had done that for her. She pictured Villanelle, nestled in her mother's lap, skinny bones under lighter hair, a Russian winter snow-white. She thought of Anna, Villanelle’s bruised face cradled in her palms, hair matted with sweat and blood beneath them.

She wondered if Konsantin had ever touched her like this, if she'd let him comfort her with fingertips on darker days.

Niko used to touch her like this all the time. Elena had too, once, after a particularly long, tearful night of drinking and no stone left unturned on her fading marriage. And then Bill. Bill had always commented on her hair, told her how jealous he was, how wild it looked, how perfect it was to style, the first one to tell her to wear it down, to tell her that _if he had to swing the other way, it would definitely be for her._

She sinks her fingers bittersweetly through soft silk until she’s down to Villanelle's scalp. The hairs on Villanelle’s arm rise. She arches like a cat.

"I let a man do this once. In a hotel."

Eve stills.

Villanelle looks back over her shoulder and rolls her eyes, though her mouth curves into a self-satisfied smile. "Not like that."

"Okay," Eve shrugs and makes a conscious effort to resume her caress. She searches for the soft spot behind Villanelle's ear, following the grooves of its shell before dipping down to the edge of her hairline. Little tilts of Villanelle's head tell her she's doing fantastically, and then -

"You are much better at it."

Eve stares at the TV. She doesn't recognise any of the characters, finds it next to impossible to follow the dialogue. She finds it even harder when Villanelle rolls onto her back and leans into the palm of her hand, cheeks flushed and eyelids low. If she stretched her thumb, it would press against Villanelle's mouth. The image squeezes tight just below her navel and inside her throat.

It takes all her strength not to, fingertips stretching against a temple instead.

"Are you going to watch the movie?"

Villanelle nods but makes no move to roll back, eyes magnetic and dark. "Yes. Just give me a minute."

 

“Do you want to talk about Bill?” Villanelle asks her later, once the TV’s paused so Eve can get snacks.

It comes so out-of-the-blue, Eve’s hand hovers mid-air, remote loose between her fingers as her brain tries to play catch-up. 

“What?”

Villanelle sits up from her snug position, lips quirking to the side in a show of remorse.

“You are watching the movie but you’re not really watching the movie.”

Eve blinks. She drops the remote and turns her head to meet Villanelle’s perplexed gaze.

“You mentioned Bill - You looked - ” Eve watches her root around for the right word, lip clamped between her teeth in thought. “I don’t know?” she sighs. “Do you want to talk about it?”

It had already been talked about. In Eve’s kitchen, almost a year ago. It had enraged her so much she’d spent weeks thinking of ways to decimate Villanelle’s entire existence. She doesn’t think she has it in her to rehash things.  

“No.”

Villanelle cocks her head. Looks at her knowingly, toeing the line between condescension and pity.

“Eve.”

“Is there something you wanted to say to me?”

“It was an accident?” she tries, wincing awkwardly. “Bad timing. You know that.”

The words land flat. She’d been hoping for something that would bring validation, a sense of relief. Not a molten sort of acrid disappointment burrowing inside the back of her mouth. That’s as good of an apology as she’s ever going to get, she figures, nodding curtly as she scoops her hair into a bun and rises. Villanelle snags her wrist.

“Eve.”

“No, you’ve said enough,” she pulls away, rubbing at the skin Villanelle had touched as she crosses the apartment, Villanelle one step behind her.

She whines, petulant and dramatic, elongating Eve’s name pleadingly.  

Eve stops at the cupboards. She presses her palms flat against the cool surface of the counter to steady herself.

The loss of him still hurt. God, did it hurt.

In the aftermath, his absence had pummelled away at her, inside her chest and her temples, carrying her through to the end of each working day until she'd get to call Niko on her way home, bone-tired and winded, nursing a migraine as she crawled back to the dull, predictable safety of him. 

She'd felt it so physically then, so entirely consumed by it that everything had begun to slowly lose its flavour, its colour, its purpose.

That had been slow to wane. No longer a missing-limb but a fracture-healed-wrong, catching her on coffee breaks or after work, Elena's arm linked with hers on wet, winter evenings spent at the pub, wishing he was with them, wishing he would tease her where Elena listened patiently, steal her food where Elena bought it for her.

It's worse now, she knows. It’s permanent. It's nestled within her for good, this constant  _lack_ , carved in the trunk of her straight down to the roots. She'd learned to make peace with it, but not with its echo, the expanding, gaping emptiness where Bill used to be.

Eve had hardly thought of him at all in Rome, too caught up in her own mess to remember him until now. All it took was a psychopath digging fingers into old wounds to remind her.

She sinks with shame.

Her eyes start to swim and then flood, fingers pressing beneath them to stem the flow. Villanelle steps close behind her.

“Eve?"

She prays Villanelle doesn’t touch her. A hand on her shoulder and the tears would come, and then the sobs and the heartbreak all over again.

"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, okay? Nobody to blame, just – You know, collateral damage," Villanelle says, barraging through everything Eve had worked so hard to rebuild. She doesn't get it, she can't get it, Eve realises helplessly, because to understand is to empathise. To understand is to have loved someone and lost, and as far as Eve's concerned, Villanelle hadn't lost much of anything.  

The guilt flashes at the forefront of her mind, in neon lights that say, _You did it, you did it, you did it_. 

Because, really, it'd almost single-handedly been her fault. Had she not invited him, had they stayed away from Berlin, had she not been bull-headed and impulsive, Bill would have remained at home with his wife, enjoying the new fruits of fatherhood.

She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes as Villanelle’s voice continues behind her, softly, insistently.

“If it makes you feel better - I am sorry. "

_You don't know what that is. And it doesn't._

Even opens the snack cupboard and stares at its contents glumly. 

She's not hungry. 

She grabs a handful of soft caramels anyway and crams them into her mouth all at once. She listens to Villanelle jump up onto the counter behind her, heels thumping as they swing.

"Are you going to share?" 

Eve pulls the bag out and rests her forehead against the cupboard door. The chewing makes her salivary glands ache in time with her tear ducts and she swallows hard against her congested sinuses. She’s on the verge of unravelling. 

She turns to find Villanelle looking at her intently. There's an unreadable look in her eyes - something soft and careful that upsets her even more.

Villanelle tries to lighten the mood, face brightening and smile cocked as she grabs at the sweets.

For a long moment, there is only the sound of loud crunching as Villanelle chews thoughtfully. Eve watches her masseters work. 

When she's satisfied, Villanelle throws the bag across the counter and dusts off her hands.

"Are you still mad at me?"

Eve crosses her arms.

"Mad."

"Sure. You are mad about Bill. I do not have a time machine. You are going to continue to be mad at me - maybe forever. This is going to be a problem."

"A problem."

"Yeah," Villanelle huffs. "I didn't mean to kill your friend. I didn't know you were close, okay? He was following me. He looked angry, Eve, I do not trust angry men in small hats," she says innocently, pushing her bottom lip out, "Can you blame me?"

Eve sighs. "Mad is the wrong word."

"…okay? Look," she starts, quiet but serious. She leans forward, elbows on her knees as she continues. "If I could go back, I would. Believe me. I would make Bill un-dead, sure. He did nothing wrong. He had a baby, yes?"

"Has. Has a baby."

"Has a baby," Villanelle nods. "I feel bad for his baby."

"And his wife."

"Yes. His wife." A deep frown carves between Villanelle's brows. She licks her lips, eyes flickering across Eve’s face to make sure she has her undivided attention. "You know what I regret?"

It sounds so silly,  _regret_ coming out of her mouth. Eve stares at it as it moves. She hopes Villanelle says,  _killing Bill_ because it won't give her peace, it won't be remorse, but it'll be simple and it’ll be something.

"What's that?"

Villanelle slumps. She spins the signet ring on her thumb. "That it still hurts you. It is obvious," she gestures, and Eve sinks further against the kitchen units, wishing she could become one with them so Villanelle can’t get to read her this well. "You are upset. Because of me."

"Not for the first time."

"Hurting someone you love was  _definitely_  not part of the plan." 

The image of Villanelle begins to blur as the lump in Eve’s throat rises. She swallows it down. “What was the plan?”

Villanelle slips off the counter. She steps to Eve, but not too close. Close enough though, that Eve could reach out and touch her.

“To get your attention.”

“You had it. You always have it. You don’t have to kill people to get my attention.”

“Really, Eve. Was it not what got your attention in the first place?” Villanelle smiles gently.

From her position, Eve must tip her chin up to meet Villanelle’s eyes. It reminds her of Tivoli. Except this time, she can look back, fearless and calm, waiting for the next move. She pushes away from the unit so they’re a foot apart.

Her eyes flick to Villanelle’s mouth.

“It’s okay to admit it. I am good at what I do. The best.”

The bravado makes it easier, somewhat, to lay her frayed feelings for Bill aside and put Villanelle in her place head-on.

“Not at everything.”

“Really.”

Eve hums quietly. “You are fucking horrible at apologies.”

She expects a laugh, but Villanelle sobers, nodding.

“You are right,” she runs her tongue over her teeth and takes a deep breath. Eve watches her straighten a little. “Eve. I am sorry.”

“Oh, come on!”

“No. I’m sorry. Really. I _am_ sorry – for hurting you. You have to know it was not my proudest moment. I didn’t think it would carry so much meaning for you. If I knew it was going to pull you away from me, it wouldn’t have happened, okay?”

Eve searches for the moment Villanelle falters, bursts out laughing. It doesn’t come.

“You think I am heartless? I know what it is like to lose someone, Eve – I know how empty it feels. I know that emptiness stays with you forever,” she shrugs her eyebrows, “and no matter how old you get or how many people you kill or fuck or love to fill it, it never leaves. You learn to live with it, right? It’s a cross to bear.”

“And whose cross do you bear?”

_A friend? A lover? Anna?_

“My mother’s.”

The blow of it slams into Eve’s chest and she exhales sharply. Villanelle’s eyes glisten.

“Oksana, I - ”

“It’s okay. It is what it is," she shrugs, "it is _not_ what made me - and it doesn’t make me any less of what I am. You can call it what you like – psychopath, assassin,” she says proudly, “it isn’t going to change. But - ” she clicks her tongue, “we have all lost somebody, Eve. You can talk to me about it, okay?”

Eve feels fingertips ghost the underside of her chin. Villanelle holds her there, between thumb and forefinger, so tenderly it almost isn't happening. Then the backs of her fingers brush the line of her jaw and Eve curls her hand hard against the edge of the countertop to steady herself.

Villanelle smiles. “Okay?”

“Yes.”

Villanelle doesn’t move to close the distance. Doesn’t take. Just stands there, patiently waiting until Eve’s plucked up the courage, plucked up the strength not only to stay rooted, but to push up on her tiptoes and finally, with a relieved, trembling sigh, bridge the space between them.

 


	8. Chapter 8

//

 

She spends two days letting it eat her alive.

Guilt is not the right word for what she feels. Nor is annoyance. Not quite humiliation. And certainly not anger. Bemusement maybe?

She remembers the press of Villanelle’s body against the counter, its quiet strength absorbing her frazzled hunger as she’d curled her fingers into a sleeve and a waist and then the soft nape of Villanelle’s neck.

She remembers the way Villanelle  _hadn’t_ yanked her closer. She  _hadn’t_  licked her tongue between Eve’s teeth,  _hadn’t_  fisted a handful of her hair and proceeded to fuck her on the kitchen floor. In fact, the only thing Villanelle had done, was accept the kiss until it was over, eyes locked on Eve’s mouth for long moments after, thumb to Eve’s cheek before she’d moved away with a parting smile and announced that she was going to get ready for bed.

She’s on her third smoke by the time the scenario’s played out. The cigarette’s stale but usable, scavenged from the back of Villanelle’s kitchen drawer of knickknacks. The swing rocks her, the back-forth of it pulling her further into her catatonic haze as her brain whirrs ten thousand miles-a-minute.

The smoke tastes good. It doesn’t taste like Villanelle. She swallows it.

“That is going to kill you, Eve,” Villanelle says from the back door, hands tucked into the pockets of her shorts as she waits for Eve to turn to her, “We don’t want that, do we?”

Eve laughs, despite herself. She drops the cigarette between her feet, crushes it beneath the heel of her sandal and scoots further up the swing to make room.

Villanelle takes her time crossing the porch. She sits beside Eve but doesn’t touch her, humming contentedly as she looks out onto her rose garden.

“Not to mention – it is really disgusting.”

Eve scoffs this time. She’s being teased. Villanelle looks so smug doing it, self-righteous but thrilled, the curve of her smile playful as she nudges Eve with her elbow.

“Have you ever kissed a smoker?”

Eve freezes. Isn't it too soon to be talking about this? She hasn’t even had enough time to process, let alone voice what happened. She’d planned it out in her head: a few days of losing her mind in solitude, followed by more over-thinking and self-hatred and then talking about it, or arguing about it, very loudly until one of them stormed out.

She had  _not_  planned this.

“I haven’t.”

“It is not enjoyable,” Villanelle makes a face, “it’s a bit like licking the inside of a chimney.

Eve crosses her arms over herself. Nods once. “Right.”

She can see Villanelle grinning at her. She wonders what would happen if she stood up and left, if she told Villanelle to stop, just once.

“Which is weird. Because kissing you is – I enjoy it. Very much. So now I’m confused.”

Eve shakes her head. She wishes she’d kept that cigarette.

“ _You’re_ confused.”

“Sure. I mean – I always knew kissing you would be excellent. I have thought about it a lot,” she shrugs, using her feet to push off and swing them a little harder, the summer wind squeaking through the frame. “Did you think about it?”

All the time. She wants to tell Villanelle that she’d thought about it since Villanelle shot at her, mouth pressed to the barrel of the gun; since Villanelle pinned her to the fridge and  _inhaled_ her. She wants to talk about Rome and Hugo and the quiet, pretty gasping sounds Eve had been made to listen to and then replayed on a loop since.

That part still feels like a by-product of her imagination.

“Not really.”

“Hmm,” Villanelle smiles. “I think you are an excellent kisser.”

Eve feels the beginnings of a smirk tug at the corners of her eyes, but she bites at it, teeth clamped to the inside of her cheek.

“Well? Do you think I’m an excellent kisser? I  _know_  I am,” Villanelle stretches in her seat arrogantly, “but it’s nice to hear, you know? You should tell me.”

“I don’t think your ego needs more stroking.”

She hears it after she’s said it, Villanelle’s eyes already wide with glee, a shit-eating grin smeared across her face.

“ _Eve_.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

“Okay,” Villanelle cackles. She reaches for a Tupperware box Eve hadn’t noticed before. “Here.”

The box is full of fruit – peaches and watermelon and blackberries, which are Eve’s favourite and Christ, had she even had breakfast that morning?

She takes a few and stuffs them in her cheeks. She’s phenomenal at that – stress eating.

“Hey, Eve?”

Eve grunts through her mouthful.

“You need to relax. Okay? You know you left the TV remote in the fridge this morning? We went to bed last night and the oven was still on.”

“Shit.”

“Look,” she says gently, setting the box aside so she can move closer. Her arm comes over Eve’s head to prop on the back rest but not around her shoulders.

Eve gulps down her bite. It’s tart and sweet and the way Villanelle looks at her is sweet too, the colour of her mouth the same shade as her stained fingers.

“I don’t know why you are not…chill,” Villanelle says.

It sounds so colloquial and funny coming from her, Eve almost forgets to fret.

“I think we are done chasing, no? You have me,” Villanelle looks pointedly at her, “I told you – I want everything you want to give me. I am going crazy wanting it, but Eve - you need to give it to me. I am not going to take anything from you. I already said so. I can wait,” she shrugs, “I am good at waiting. Good things are worth waiting for.”

Eve is good at waiting too. It feels like she’s spent most of her life waiting – for the right job, the right friends, the right husband, the right time, the right place. She prods her tongue against the back of her teeth in frustration.

“And if you don’t want it anymore - ” Villanelle’s voice wavers. Eve watches her blink up into the hot sun for a moment, squinting against the Italian horizon, “Well – I made cottage pie, so we can talk about that. Or eat it. Whatever you like.”

“I thought I was. I thought I was being very clear.”

Villanelle tuts at her.

“You, kissing me, is not very clear. It sends mixed signals, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Eve. I was waiting to see if you were going to  _cry_. Digging up past trauma and then kissing me?” Villanelle scrunches her nose, “Not very sexy. Don’t get me wrong - you know I think  _you_ , are _extremely_  sexy. But I am not going to talk about Bill and then have sex with you. It’s not very polite.”

Though she supposes she should feel furious for having her emotions babysat - by a  _twenty-six year old_  - Eve feels overwhelmingly cared for, and a little flattered that Villanelle hadn’t taken advantage of her, or worse, pity-fucked her.

Still, she’s not about to let herself get lectured.

“Who said anything about sex?”

Villanelle claps her hands together animatedly and smacks her lips. She reaches for Eve’s fingers as she stands, tugging Eve up along with her and back towards the house. “Come on, let’s go inside. You are being a dickhead and I’m hungry.”

 

She hates shepherd’s pie. She hates it even as Villanelle pours her a second glass of red. It tastes good, objectively, and in comparison to Niko’s, but as she slides her fork through mash, she can’t help but wonder: who the hell taught Villanelle to cook this, and why, amidst dozens of Italian alternatives, Villanelle had decided to choose the worst of Britain.

“You don’t like it.”

Eve shakes her head adamantly, shovelling a heaped fork into her mouth just to prove a point. She swallows quickly. “No – it’s – it’s good.” She chases the bite with wine.

“Niko gave me the recipe.”

“What?”

Villanelle takes a sip of her own drink, eyes careful over the rim of her glass. Finally, she settles. “In Oxford.”

“Oh. He said he saw you.”

She watches Villanelle shift in her seat. There’s something uneasy about it. Eve wonders if Villanelle is still jealous, despite everything. Wonders if she should tell Villanelle exactly how little she’d thought of Niko, how relieved she’d been to have the pale naked strip of her ring finger fade into caramel under the Roman sun.

“Do you miss him?”

“No,” she chews. “Not even a little.”

“But you are still married to him.”

“Legally. Yes.”

“But?”

“Hopefully not for long.”

It seems to appease Villanelle who smirks into her plate. “Is that what you are going to do when you go back to London? Get a divorce?”

Eve raises an eyebrow, amused. “Why? Would you like to come with me?”

Villanelle gives a non-comital shrug, but her smile dazzles brilliantly and for Eve, that’s answer enough.

 

She’s awake. Just about. She doesn’t open her eyes straight away, though the bright light of day wants her to. She basks in the lingering warmth of her dream, the soft hum between her legs as she buries her face into the pillow, breathless.

“Morning.”

Eve feels her face flush. She opens one eye to see Villanelle looking at her.

“Morning.” And then – “Oh  _God_.”

“What?”

To start with, Eve has no idea how long Villanelle had been watching her like that, all pale grey eyes and longing thoughtfulness. When she’s a little more alert, she thinks of Rome and that morning voice in her ear and everything that had preceded it. The hum between her legs turns into a choir.

“I - Nothing." 

Villanelle pulls the sheets up to her chin. It makes her look younger, lit by the morning sun.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Mmh. Did you?”

“Me too,” Villanelle whispers.

It’s unnerving, being looked at the way Villanelle looks at her – intense but distant, dreamy and wide awake and curious and knowing, like she wants to read Eve from start to finish even though she could recite the chapters by heart.

They’ve been here once before.

“Are you hungry?”

Eve shakes her head. She props her elbow beneath her head to match Villanelle’s level.

“Do you want coffee?”

Eve smiles this time, a tired, pleased smile that starts at the corners of her mouth and blooms all the way up to her eyes. “I’m okay.”

 Villanelle nods. Her throat bobs nervously.

The gesture is so human, so unexpected – this faltering, unprepared version of Villanelle - that Eve lets herself stare. When her eyes flick back up, Villanelle’s pupils have drowned the hazel around them. “Can I touch you?”

She wants to blurt out,  _where?_ but Villanelle’s fingers beat her to it, cautious and feather-light, as they hover for permission at the line of her jaw.

She nods dumbly.

Villanelle strokes her there. Her fingertips trace the skin beneath the tangles of her hair in little curling motions - touch, retreat, touch, retreat. Then the pad of a thumb is kissing the curve of her cheek, ticklish and brief as it traverses to her mouth.

For the umpteenth time, she feels completely, gloriously naked under Villanelle’s gaze.

“I could make you breakfast.”

“You always make breakfast.”

“I could make it again.”

Eve hums. “You could. You could stay?”

Villanelle’s eyes shine playfully, dark. The electricity they stir reaches all the way down to the tips of Eve’s toes. She wants to take five deep breaths in quick succession, just to stop her head from swimming.

“What would we  _do_  here?” Villanelle looks around exaggeratedly, as if searching for things to occupy them. 

Eve knows what she’s doing. (Buying her time so she doesn’t have a total breakdown). She’s grateful for it.

“I’m sure we could find something.”

“Really?”

“Maybe.”

“Eve?”

Eve’s eyebrows raise.

“Are you coming onto me?”

“A little.”

“A little bit,” Villanelle whispers knowingly. She chews on her bottom lip through her cocky, blissfully happy smile. Eve waits for her to say something clever and obnoxious, not at all disappointed when it happens. “Do you want to have sex with me?”

A laugh bursts from her.

Villanelle schools her face so Eve can’t tell if she’s playing or deathly serious.

“Do you?”

“A little bit,” Eve parrots. Her entire visual field floods with Villanelle and her glowing skin and her hungry, parted mouth.

 _Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,_ her brain chants.

“Only a little bit?”

She wants Villanelle to engulf her, to rip her from the shore and drag her straight to the seabed. She’d happily never resurface again.

“A little,” she mouths, reaching for Villanelle’s hand across the sheets. She slots their fingers together. Tugs her closer. Closes her eyes and sighs, “A lot.”

The rhythm of her pulse stutters.

Her mouth shakes.

Villanelle kisses her, at last, lips clasping over her own, still, just once, too soft and brief and warm, and Eve wants it to happen over and over and –

“Come here, Eve. Just come here,” Villanelle whispers, curling fingers gently around her shoulder to pull her on top, arranging them with one steady hand on her waist and the other splayed across her ribs. “Is this what you want?”

_This is what you wanted._

The topography of Villanelle’s body collides with her own like it was made to, in one, enormous  _whoosh,_  a burst of heat that instantly tethers and unmoors her. She pushes blindly into it, into Villanelle’s wanting but infuriatingly passive hands.

“Eve?”

Eve stares down at Villanelle’s open face, blonde hair haloed on the pillow.

Her mind flashes to Hugo – to the wiry, intrusive planes of him and how much and how little she’d wanted  _not_ -him. She pictures Niko, remembers the foliage of him where Villanelle is smooth, his jagged edges where Villanelle is soft.

She brackets Villanelle’s hips with her thighs greedily. Between Villanelle’s skin and hers, there’s only her cotton pyjamas, the cool silk of Villanelle’s shorts. She wants to run before she walks, wants to slide her hands under Villanelle’s camisole before she’s rendered speechless and boneless and useless.

She shifts in Villanelle’s lap. “Yeah. I do. Oksana -” she looks down helplessly, watching as fingers curl between her own and tug them up around Villanelle’s neck, hand-on-hand until Villanelle applies pressure, lightly and then harder.

She holds firm, a determined, melancholy shadow settling over her as she tips her chin back to give Eve better access. “I’m not going to hurt you.”  

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Eve nods quickly.

“Are you going to hurt me?”

Eve could. Villanelle would let her. She could make a fist and watch the light die. She could squeeze and squeeze and not let go. Her chest thuds miserably. She jerks her hand away and slides soothing knuckles over the aching skin above Villanelle’s collarbones.

“No.”

Villanelle pushes up into her touch, onto elbows and then into a sitting position. She clasps Eve’s jaw between careful fingers, nose brushing against Eve’s own as she says against her mouth, “I’m going to take off your clothes, okay?”

Eve feels the words sling between her legs.

“I really want to see you naked.”

She wishes she wasn’t wearing so many buttons. Who the fuck designed buttons on pyjamas? She’d prefer if Villanelle undid them with one quick yank, but she doesn’t. She licks her lips and goes at a glacial pace, so slowly and quietly, Eve can only hear the rasp of her own, desperate breathing and the satisfying snapping sounds as each button slides through its hole.

She wonders if Villanelle has a slight masochistic streak in her, to be taking so long. But it is nice, being enjoyed the way Villanelle seems to enjoy her, all wide eyes and wet mouth Eve pictures on her exposed collarbones and then between her breasts.

She quickly scoops her hair into a bun, inviting Villanelle to the expanse of her bared neck.

Villanelle whines, annoyed.

Her thighs clench.

Villanelle leans into her. “Take your hair down, Eve,” she growls, reaching to help let loose the curls on top of her head. When they fall, Villanelle sinks both hands into them, firm but painless, guiding her gently closer. Eve wants her to  _pull_. She shudders when fingernails scrape against her scalp.

She’s  _waiting, waiting, waiting._

“Okay?”

She nods breathlessly.

Villanelle drops one hand to finish the remaining buttons. When the sides of her top separate, Villanelle doesn’t part them further, tipping her head to look at her through hooded lashes.

She’s burning up. She’s so overheated it almost hurts. She wants to say something sexy, something confident like,  _fuck me already_  or  _I need to come_  but all she manages is a wound-up  _please_ that Villanelle swallows with her mouth, curling her tongue against Eve’s own with a careful nudge of her head. And then she does it again, and then again and again and Eve’s bucking her hips to the rhythm and wondering what she might look like to a passer-by: straddling an assassin, with her checked pyjamas and dishevelled hair and probably morning breath and stubbly legs.

She can’t bring herself to care. Villanelle doesn’t seem to. She lets herself get lost in the kiss, lets it drown out her nerves as Villanelle strips her bare.

She hardly has time to open her eyes before Villanelle’s pulling back, dropping her gaze – not to her breasts, though Eve wishes she would – to the fading wound at her navel, hands fingering the one at her back where her eyes can’t reach.

“What are you -”

“Shh,” Villanelle says, a little harshly, pacifying Eve with a quick, apologetic kiss and then refocussing. “I just want to – I want to,” she mumbles. Eve feels a thumb sink into the scar. There’s an echo of a throb there, eclipsed by the one lower down, the forest-fire between her legs. Villanelle stares for long, stretched-out moments, sombre and contemplative. She licks her lips again. “I am going to kiss you there, okay?”

Eve shivers.

“I want to kiss you everywhere but,” she nods decisively, “I want to kiss you there first.”

“Okay.”

Villanelle rids herself of her camisole in one quick, confident swoop that makes her fly-aways stick up, leaving no room for Eve to dabble with undressing her, though she hopes Villanelle lets her remove the shorts herself, eventually.

She catches sight of Villanelle’s own silver scar. Makes a mental note to lavish it with attention. Gasps when Villanelle wraps arms around her and wipes the fantasy from her mind as she rolls her flat onto the mattress.

She grunts with the surprise of it. And then she  _laughs,_ shrill and indulgent and happy. Villanelle beams.

“ _Eve_.”

“Sorry.”

Villanelle props herself on an elbow. Her cheeks curve in a kinder, more affectionate smile Eve leans up to kiss.

“What other sounds will you make?”

And just like that, she's flung from tenderness to cloudy, harrowing desire, disarmed and open as Villanelle lowers to meet her.

 


	9. Chapter 9

//

 

She shifts, the soft, consuming weight of Villanelle’s body welcome between her legs. They tighten around Villanelle's waist, tethering her closer with every tilt of her mouth, warm and pliant against Eve's own, against her jaw and neck and then under her ear and on her throat where her heart beats loudest.

Villanelle kisses the way she eats – single-mindedly and with a hunger that consumes Eve like an earthquake, quiet at first, then magnifying and resonant in the breathless cathedral of her ribs and the pulsing in her wrists.

Villanelle clasps her there. She sinks deeper beneath the touch, clever fingers curling to hold her, but only just. They had already done so many things to her: nourished and destroyed and tended and hurt and coaxed and Eve’s dizzy with it all, knowing those hands finally had her, that she was happy to fall right into them.

She wonders what would happen if she tried to pull away, wonders if Villanelle would let her. She feels the clasp morph then, tentatively into a grip, and hot pressure pools in her belly, hips jolting up, up, up.

Villanelle’s mouth works idly across her chest, breath wet and ticklish against the parts where she wants teeth, the trace of a smile grazed across her ribs where she needs pressure.

It pulls stubborn affection from her, even as her breath turns sticky in her lungs.

She stares at the crown of Villanelle’s head.

She's desperate to touch her, to run her fingers through blonde hair, pale in the morning sun; desperate to palm the nape of her neck, to guide her and ask  _more, please, I need more._

She sucks her lips over her teeth impatiently, huffing through her nose. Her eyes follow as Villanelle kisses around a nipple, across the tender curves of her breasts but not where she needs it, not where it aches.

Villanelle laughs into her flushed skin. Her gaze snaps up.

Eve growls.

“ _Oksana_.”

“Be  _patient_ ,” Villanelle sing-songs, placating her with a quick kiss to her mouth, hand coming loose to smooth over her stomach.

Eve shivers. Villanelle is so good at that, it's almost worth the agonising wait, tongue sliding over her own, over the backs of her teeth, over the smooth arch of her palate, lazy and yielding as Eve pushes back. There's a groan from somewhere deep inside her when Villanelle's kiss ricochets to the apex of her thighs. She squeezes them tighter.

She's given no time to really enjoy it before Villanelle's pulling away, apologetic but pleased - Eve can tell from her crooked, secret smile. She scoots down, head bowed to nose against the curve of her solar plexus, licking her there playfully and then properly, with the flat of her tongue following the jagged line of her stitched wound.

It’s one of the most erotic things Eve’s ever seen. It’s bittersweet, the way Villanelle looks at her reverently as she does it, both hands splayed across her sides to bring her up to her mouth, licking clean all the shame and anger and embarrassment (though Eve would rather die than admit it) that had been building up inside her for months.

Villanelle spends long minutes there, half-covering her with her own body until she can’t see the scar at all, its permanent ugliness swallowed by Villanelle's mouth.

There's a muffled whine as Villanelle kisses her again, then says, "You are thinking too loudly."

Eve reaches down to squeeze her shoulder. Her fingers catch in Villanelle’s own, confused eyes lifting to check on her.

Villanelle shifts up to prop herself on an elbow, sobering.

"Does it hurt?"

_Yes. And no._

Eve swallows.

"Do you like what I am doing to you?" Villanelle says, voice worried and rough around the edges with desire. She moves closer.

Eve cups her cheek.

"Do you, Eve?" she says seriously.

The answer is already there – in the chaotic hum of her pulse, the sweat behind her knees, the barely-there not-at-all-her mewling sounds Villanelle had already drawn out.

"Yes."

Villanelle waits for a beat, waits for her to change her mind but it doesn't come, only the burbling wave of  _too much and not enough_  that washes over her, Villanelle’s hand folding into her own like an anchor.

“I am going to take care of you,” she whispers.

Eve sinks her fingers into her hair, finally, allowing Villanelle to scoot lower, eyes up as she works a little quicker, a little harder, pressing open kisses between Eve's ribs and breasts, just below her navel and across to her incision, peppered with her burning mouth and with words Eve should find infuriatingly cliché but doesn't, letting them settle within her like pebbles in a bowl.

An arm slides beneath her lower back to pull her flush up. "Beautiful," Villanelle whispers again as she traces across her stomach with the tip of her index finger.

Eve watches, lip clamped between her teeth. Her hands fist Villanelle’s hair to stop them from shaking.

"So beautiful," Villanelle tells her over and over like a mantra, nosing along the waistband of her pyjamas, the string pulled tight. The cotton just below is wet - Eve can feel the cool damp of it whenever Villanelle pushes her breasts into her, pinning her.

She arches up for more pressure.

Villanelle holds her in place.

“Eve, let me enjoy you,” she chuckles, tugging at the fabric to get to the crest of her hip where she leaves a kiss and another and another, distracting Eve as her fingers make quick work of the drawstring, undoing it with a single pull.

Something inside Eve coils tight.

Her breath quickens. The way Villanelle looks at her is all hunger, eyes dark with want behind her lashes. She’s seen that look countless times before – toeing the line between feral and calculating, a shark’s fin circling the surface.

Except this time, Villanelle waits, lingers and waits and God, if it doesn’t kill her, that look alone just might.

Her nerves vibrate, heart wild in her chest.

She lifts her pelvis. Helps push the material slowly over her thighs and down. Doesn't miss the way Villanelle inhales her greedily, moaning as she tosses the pyjamas off the bed and comes to press a cheek to her inner thigh. She looks up.

There's something so unabashed about her, laced with a sweetness Eve hadn't seen coming. Each time she’d thought about it, she'd expected Villanelle to dive in, no warning or finesse, to ravage her, to take until it was enough, to roll over and wipe her mouth and grin arrogantly, waiting for Eve to find her strength again.

But this - this is Villanelle, breathing in the hothouse cherry-blossom scent of her body, her sleep-sweat, mouth parted, patient.

Eve reaches for her face. She sinks her thumb into the plump of her lip, rubbing the wet there. She can feel Villanelle pant against her and then dart out to nip her.

She throbs all over, like sitting on a rollercoaster ride - the thrill of being suspended, waiting to see what Villanelle might do with her.

She pushes hair out of Villanelle’s eyes to see them better. They’re glazed. The pupils are blown – if she were any closer, Eve would see her own reflection in them, see the unravelling mess Villanelle’s made of her.

She feels the weight of Villanelle’s breasts against her bare skin as Villanelle moves into her, slowly, savouring the look and feel of her. She has the irrational urge to clamp her legs shut, to block everything out but Villanelle doesn’t let up, a low, needy whine stifled into her thigh as she bends her knee to allow more room.

Villanelle sucks a tiny, blooming bruise there, sore and gorgeous. She sucks another one a little higher up, sucks  _you’re mine_ wordlessly into Eve’s skin, into the sensitive junction of leg and pelvis, knuckles brushing the back of her thigh and gripping there to pull her close.

Eve groans as her body slides down. She watches Villanelle hook her leg over her shoulder before lowering her mouth, lashes fluttering as she bows and licks in one, languid swipe that sears straight through her entire being.

For the first time in her life, Eve doesn’t close her eyes; doesn’t fight to summon images behind her eyelids; doesn’t turn her face away into the pillow. Only anchors her gaze onto Villanelle’s tongue as it works between her legs, unsure whether the keening, trembling sounds are Villanelle’s or her own.

In minutes, Villanelle’s inside her, beckoning tortuously with two fingers, then three, and Eve grows impossibly wetter at the stretch, lifting into her hand for more: friction, tongue, heat, Villanelle’s firm thrusts smacking softly, the sound of her arousal clear in the quiet of their room. There's no obnoxious slapping of bedframe against wall, no masculine grunts to put her off, just Villanelle’s soft, glistening mouth sliding where she needs it most.

She lets herself moan. The noise that crawls out of her is real – not a porn mimic, not an ego stroke - low and animalistic, mirrored perfectly by Villanelle as she tilts harder into her.

Her pulse almost drowns the sound Villanelle makes when she cries out. Eve watches her shoulder blades move beneath her skin, the notches of her spine curving and arching beautifully against the bed. As they do, Villanelle's mouth loosens, tongue turning slack and imprecise and Eve chases it desperately with her hips, drunk with desire.

It drives her crazy.

 _“_ Oksana –  _Oksana_ \- ” she writhes. She feels so feverish that it starts to ache, in the pit of her stomach, the base of her back, like she needs to detonate, or she’ll implode. She searches the mattress blindly for Villanelle’s hand.

Her eyes fall across the sheets to the rhythm of Villanelle’s hips rutting into the bed, wrist tucked into her shorts as she tries to juggle Eve's pleasure with her own.

She thinks she could fall in love with the way Villanelle sounds, strung-out on her own bliss, half-way to falling apart but not by Eve's hands. A quick panic flashes through her.

“Jesus,  _fuck_ ," she feels her throat close around the words and she tugs at Villanelle and she wants her to stop and to  _not_ -stop because watching her do this – licking at her whilst she touches herself – is incomparable to Rome and the fantasy of what she might look and sound like when she comes. She squeezes her eyes shut. “Don’t,” she gasps, summoning everything within her to push a heel against Villanelle’s shoulder.

Villanelle’s eyes snap up.

“I want to – ” she scrambles, arching her hips back towards her mouth, shuddering when Villanelle sucks at her gently. " _Wait_  - Oksana, I want - " she says breathlessly, sighing, relieved when Villanelle understands, hips stilling and fingers reaching to take her hand obediently.

They're wet and stick to her own.

She places them over her breast. “I’m going to touch you,” she promises, “I want to,  _God_ , I  _want to_ , just - ”

Just not yet, not quite, because there’s a tongue inside her, Villanelle’s hand gripping her own tightly, pressing to her chest to ground some small part of her as she's ripped into the dizzying undercurrent of her orgasm.

It thunders through her, violently, furious, starting from her pelvis and spreading into her hot, pulsing wound, up to her heaving lungs, Villanelle’s arm locked around her thigh as she keens and then quakes into her mouth.

Her blood rushes to the surface, heels flat to the bed, hips ground down against Villanelle's fingers and lips. 

She lets the pleasure devour her completely until there's nothing of her but a thick, clouded haze and the faint sensation that they're still connected, Villanelle's kisses scattering over the line of her pubic bone.

She stares up at the ceiling, blinking herself half-way to consciousness, her breath playing catch-up. Villanelle’s body moves up slowly over her own.

Villanelle whispers to her in French, followed by words she knows are Russian,  _milaya_ and  _krasivaya_ and she’s dying to know what they both mean, their soft, rhyming sounds cocooned into the nape of her neck.

She turns her head. Somewhere between kissing her stomach and now, Villanelle had managed to sweep her hair into a loose bun, exposing Eve’s favourite parts of her – her jaw, her neck, a collar bone.

Eve kisses her. She can taste herself faintly on Villanelle's mouth and she curls her tongue deeper, sated but curious, Villanelle’s thighs settling astride her own. She feels Villanelle press down into her, fingertips tickling her waist and then lower.

“Can you go again?”

She laughs.  _Absolutely not._ She grabs her descending wrist.

“Not yet.”

Villanelle nods, lowering herself to lie next to her, body damp with sweat as it nestles into her side, head tucked onto the shared pillow underneath. She watches Eve but makes no move to crowd her or touch her or  _be_  touched, even though Eve can hear her frantic heartbeat and smell the heady scent rising off her.

She turns so they can face each other in silence.

She'd expected to feel nervous, or awkward maybe, but all she feels is content, thrumming with arousal that now burns low, but burns nonetheless, roaring every time her eyes fall to Villanelle's breasts, nipples the same pretty shade as her mouth. Her eyes fall lower, over the gentle dip of Villanelle's linea alba leading all the way down into the waistband of her shorts. She lets her hand rest heavy on the curve of her hip, tucking her fingers beneath the silk seam.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to undress you. Are you going to let me?"

Eve doesn't miss the quick way Villanelle's eyelashes flutter, flashing with surprise before she schools her face and gives a shrug.

"Sure."

"Is that okay?"

She feels so silly asking, but Villanelle's voice shakes a little when she says  _yes_  and suddenly there's a high flush all over her cheeks that deepens when Eve bends and they work together to shimmy the shorts down. Villanelle kicks them off. She reclines, casual and naked in front of her, but she's breathless, eyes darting across Eve's face and if it isn't the most endearing thing Eve's seen her do.

She rolls onto her back to give Villanelle some space, hands coming together between them.

After long, stretched out moments of listening to the curtains rustle against the floor, Eve swallows and takes a deep breath.

“Did you ever touch Anna like this?” she asks, glancing curiously at Villanelle's profile, searching for the shadow she knows might pass over her. It does – a melancholy, fleeting thing that tightens her mouth and settles in her eyes.

Villanelle nods. She doesn't look back at her.

Eve's entire body stiffens. Not with jealousy – she’d be an idiot not to recognise that Villanelle adored women, and plenty of them had come and gone before her. But with worry, with the realisation that Anna, soft-spoken and wounded, had also been the same woman to enter into a liaison with a sixteen-year-old, a  _minor_ , a child that Eve’s pretty sure would have triggered some sort of safeguarding alert had it happened in the UK.

She squeezes Villanelle's hand, thankful when she squeezes back.

“Did she touch you?”

Villanelle nods again. “Once.”

“Did you want her to?” Eve says carefully, barely a whisper, too afraid she’ll hear an answer she doesn’t want.

“Yes.”

She sighs, pleased. She scoots a little closer, watching as the sun soaks through the window and over Villanelle's bare skin. She imagines Anna disrobing her from layers and layers of winter clothing, kissing her frosty fingertips and pale body, lowering to her knees and kissing between her thighs. And then telling her to leave, telling her Max will be home, telling her not to send more letters.

She stifles down the details of Max's murder, folding them into a cramped little box for later, for another time.

“Did you like it? When – Anna, when she…”

The moment hangs, suspended.

Eve watches Villanelle's throat bob, once, twice, watches her run her hands over her face. She turns to look at Eve and the moment is gone.

“I like it when  _you_  touch me.”

Eve still feels it, the unsettling, niggling inside her that doesn’t sit quite right. She wants to ask Villanelle about it, intrusive as it may be: what were those afternoons with Anna like? What did it feel like to be with her, at that time, in Russia? Had she loved her? Had it hurt her? Why only once?

And then to apologise, endlessly: for whatever fucked up things they'd done to each other, Villanelle had been a kid, Villanelle had been  _Oksana_ , rude and intelligent and undoubtedly charming, but at the end of the day, a kid.

That should have been reason enough for Anna to steer clear.

Eve turns to her side, mirroring Villanelle, like two book-ends.

“You’ve barely let me,” she whispers, touching a loose strand of Villanelle’s hair beside her ear and letting it wind around her finger. She feels Villanelle’s cheek radiate against her open palm and she stretches her thumb to the curve of her bottom lip as it deepens into a tentative smile.

Villanelle's eyes glimmer mischievously. She tips her chin, darting her tongue out for a quick lick over Eve's finger, indicating that whatever sombre cloud had shrouded over her, was gone. Eve lets out a laugh, the quiet tenderness disappearing with it.

“I will let you, Eve,” she rolls her eyes. She lies flat, tugging on Eve's wrist to pull her close, arm curling around her waist. "See?" she concedes. 

There's something about her, laying beneath Eve, spread and full of  _light_ , that makes Eve want to burst from the inside out, with pride and disbelief and terrifying devotion unlike any she's ever felt before. She lowers her body so their ribs slot together.

Villanelle licks her lips. She pushes hair away from Eve’s face to get a good look. "Is that better?"

It is. It's glorious - being wrapped in Villanelle's hips instead of the cool, sodden sheets. 

"Yes."

"Good. Stay there, okay?" she toys with Eve's hair, running it through her fingers over and over, her foot trailing up the inside of Eve's calf. "Just for a bit?”

Eve looks down between them, where every part of their skin touches.

“Like this?”

“Yeah. I want you to be on top when I come, okay?”

The words shoot through Eve, innocent and erotic and vulnerable, and she knows she would take any direction from Villanelle, if it meant having her, and knowing her like this.


	10. Chapter 10

//

 

The plane jets drone on. Eve sits next to the wing and stares out of her window, tiny drops of condensation running across her visual field. Physically, she’s thirty-five-thousand feet off the ground, half-way across France. She left the remaining parts of herself in Italy.

The feeling is surreal – of being present but not so, grounded and ungrounded at the same time. Grounded - by her seatbelt, by the arm rests keeping her apart from her neighbour, by the book in her lap. Ungrounded – by the fact that her entire body feels effervescent, Villanelle’s touch still present on her neck, the insides of her wrists.

She’d caught a few hours of fitful sleep between sundown - when Villanelle had taken mercy on her and brought her dinner in bed - and the blaring sound of her alarm clock just before daybreak.

She decides to try tethering herself to reality by splitting up her travel time in activity-sized chunks.

She makes it through the safety demonstrations.

And through refreshments.

She reads one page of her book. Her eyes scan and re-scan the same paragraphs, the words blurring into odd shapes.

She blinks them into focus, but they refuse to register. The only thing her body seems to gravitate towards is the memory of breakfast shared in bed, of being naked and eating fruit and swapping stained kisses on stained sheets; the feel of Villanelle’s hands on her back, tickling down her spine mid-nap; the sound of Villanelle beneath her, how pliant she’d been, how tightly she’d held on, how softly she’d breathed.

Eve shifts uncomfortably. Her face burns. Her eyes dart around, fearful that her thoughts have somehow suddenly released themselves and begun to broadcast for the world to hear.

The man next to her gives her a polite nod.

Her knee knocks into her tray table as she slumps down further in her seat. The breakfast in front of her goes untouched.

 

When the plane lands, there’s no armada of police cars to greet it. No blaring sirens or wild goose-chase. No yanking of arms behind shoulders or full-body pat-downs.

She walks straight through _Arrivals_ feeling like a fraud, because that's who she is now. Her passport no longer says Eve Polastri. She’s been given a new birth month – Villanelle had chosen it for her and promised to celebrate with her in London.

The pick-up point is desolate. A few black cabs circle City Airport, slick with the morning rain, scouring for commuters.

Eve pulls her hood over her head and yanks her suitcase towards the road. She’s about to raise her hand when she hears the blare from the horn of the parked Subaru.

Her body freezes, feet glued to the ground. Something inside her tells her to run, to get the fuck out of there and not look back, fist clenched tight to her luggage.

Then the car backs up before she has a chance, and the passenger window rolls down and Eve expects to come face-to-face with the pointed barrel of a gun.

Instead, she comes face-to-face with Kenny.

“Eve.”

“Fuck,” she breathes, peering through the window to make sure it’s really him. He smiles nervously at her. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Came to give you a lift.”

She wants to ask who sent him. She already knows. It floods her with rage, with an irrational need to throw something at him, to kick his rear-view mirror down.

“I’m getting a cab.”

Kenny shuts off the engine and drops his hands in his lap. He looks tired. He looks put-upon and fed up and God help her if she feels even an ounce of pity.

“Come inside. Please.”

She scoffs. She pulls her anorak firmly around herself and steps back, away from the car and away from Kenny’s pleading, pathetic face. Going with him means having that noose right back around her, stepping into a bear trap, teleporting back two months instead of looking ahead.

“I’m getting an Uber.”

His smile turns puzzled as he looks at her Nokia.

“ _Fine._ A cab then. Or the DLR.”

“Eve.”

The rain starts to pour harder, soaking through her hood and her sandals, because when Villanelle had bought her clothes, she hadn’t thought to make them weather appropriate.

When she leans her forearms against the car door, water slides off her sleeves and onto the passenger seat.

“Clean-up, huh?” she nods angrily, grinding her jaw as she stares at Kenny who squirms under her gaze, in his juvenile sweatshirt and his stupid New Balance trainers. “You were in on this the _whole_ time? You knew about this the  _entire fucking time_? What the fuck is wrong with you?” she finds herself jabbing her finger at him, grateful for the passenger seat that separates him from her itching fists. ”You know what? _Fuck_ you. You absolute _prick_.”

He turns the radio down to give Eve more space and quiet to vent. When there’s no sign of stopping, he releases the passenger door and pleads with her to get in.

“I know. I don’t really…know what to say. Can you maybe - come inside, please? We can talk in the car. I’m sure there’s a lot that um – a lot of questions, I just – I’m just trying to take you home like Konstantin asked.”

Her breath leaves her. Konstantin had asked him. Not Carolyn. Of course, not Carolyn. Konstantin, probably through word from Villanelle.

She throws the door open and topples into the car along with her suitcase which Kenny helps manoeuvre into the back seat. She doesn’t look at him though, eyes firm on the windscreen, flickering as the wipers rattle back and forth to shield them from the downpour.

“Can we - ” he mumbles, turning the key in the ignition but not making a move to pull out. “Before I take you back, can we – do you want some breakfast? Or – coffee, maybe? Brunch? I know a good place in Peckham, I think you'd like it, I...”

Eve folds her arms over her chest. Her stomach grumbles. She should’ve had the soggy bacon sandwich on the plane.

Kenny gives a long, despondent sigh. “It’s good to see you, Eve. I – I’m really glad you’re back.”

She reaches over for the volume dial, twisting so the annoying sound of early morning radio floods the car and drowns out all the things she’s dying to say.

 

During the ride over, she'd considered the fact that returning to her home address - the first place the authorities might look, and probably already had - wasn't the best of plans, but Kenny had reassured her that the house had been put under survaillance for her own safety, that at present, she was under their protection whilst Raymond's murder remained hot off the press.

She finds her house stripped of any semblance of home. Walking back into it after so many weeks away feels almost dream-like, a place she should love but barely recognises.

The first thing she notices is the empty coat rack, nestled in its shadowy corner like a lonely skeleton waiting for her return. She leaves her suitcase at the foot of the stairs and makes her way to the living room. She doesn't trip over Niko's sneakers discarded half-way down the hall. Doesn't smell his aftershave or see his bag on the kitchen counter.

He hasn’t left her with much.

The bookshelf is littered with her old criminology textbooks but no candles, no CDs, no prints. The long, bare spaces between them remind her of missing teeth, the cavities he used to fill. Her spider plant sits wilted on top of the fireplace, its spindly tips curled like brown sugar paper - a reminder of her total inability to care for all or any living thing. Niko's monstera is gone, the yukka and his bonsai tree.

She finds that she no longer has a spice rack. Or cookbooks or glasses or herbs that used to decorate the window sill.

He’d left her the TV and the sofas, a couple of picture frames she figures he didn’t have the strength to touch.

She picks one up. Dust and her own reflection stare back at her, but the glass hardly weighs anything at all in her hand.

She does feel it – a twinge of fleeting nostalgia for the life she’s chosen to leave behind, eclipsed by relief and the technicolour kaleidoscope of Villanelle’s skin and eyes and parting words, promises whispered into her hair.

The frame drops from her hand into the kitchen bin with a loud clang and Eve studies the corkboard of takeaways beside the fridge. Without a smartphone, she’s going to have to do things the old-fashioned way.

There’s something about it – liberation from technology, the peaceful void her summer months had become -  that makes Eve wish she’d chosen to stay in the Italian countryside forever, no name, no face, just Villanelle and her, and carbohydrate-based take-outs for all of eternity.

The thought crystallises into longing, and her phone buzzes in her hand.

 

Oksana:

_Are you safe?_

 

There’s an aeroplane emoji, followed by a thinking emoji, followed by a waving hand, that her phone seems to have translated into semi-recognisable symbols.

Eve reads the words twice, pedestrian as they are, and that longing inside her intensifies into a physical ache. She slumps onto the sofa to gather herself.

                                   

                                                                                                Me:

_Did you send Kenny?_

Oksana:

_So it's a yes? And yes._

Me:

_I’m home._

The three dots blink at her as she waits for Villanelle’s reply. Long minutes pass and the dots appear and disappear and Eve fidgets in her seat, pulse speeding up each time they flash, wondering whether Villanelle’s out to fuck with her or if she really is putting a lot of thought into her response.

 

Oksana:

_What are you wearing?_

 

Eve scoffs, then sends what she hopes looks like a middle finger in text.

 

Oksana:

_I thought we already did that._

Me:

_Oksana._

Oksana:

_You know I can still hear you say my name? I like how you say it. Over_

_And over_

_And over_

_And –_

 

Eve hits the call button, pleased when Villanelle picks up on the first ring.

“Eve.”

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

She can hear Villanelle’s smile through the phone, pictures her sitting in her garden, smug and swamped in sunshine as she rocks on the swing, or perched on the kitchen counter, free hand stuffed in a bag of something sweet.

“What are you doing?”

“I was waiting for you to call. It is almost four o’clock there and you have left me hanging. That is very rude of you.”

She chews on her lip, biting back a grin. Villanelle’s tone falls just short of reprimanding, unable to hide the softness or concern for her.

“Were you worrying about me?” she teases but it comes out strained, hopeful for the truth, hopeful that whatever bliss she’d left behind hadn’t only been a mirage.

“Of course. Always.”

Her breath catches. Selfishly, and without planning to do it herself, she wants Villanelle to gush over her, to be romantic just like she had that weekend, speaking in a myriad of languages that all boiled down to a meaning Eve needed no translation for.

But what if she’d misread? What if she’d misjudged? She had a knack for it. Disappointingly, Villanelle doesn’t say any more, so she scrapes a weary hand through her hair and leans her head back against the sofa.

“I had breakfast with Kenny.”

“What did he say?”

“Carolyn wants to talk. I told him I’d rather take another bullet.”

Villanelle doesn’t laugh. Eve coughs awkwardly and ploughs on.

“She’s re-offering the job. She wants us to work for her. Again.”

“ _Really_.”

Eve thinks back to what Kenny had told her – how he’d addressed Carolyn as _mum_ and made it all sound so berserk at the time, the fact that _mum_ _wanted to chat things through after the shitstorm in Rome_ and _mum thought her and Villanelle made a good team, despite a little manipulation here and there and Eve’s very clear lack of judgement._

“With only the worst intentions, I imagine. Keep your friends close, right?" she says, as Villanelle grunts, unimpressed. She props her feet on the coffee table, knocking into her closed laptop. "Honestly? At this point? We're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't.”

There’s a tense silence that fills the line. Eve listens to Villanelle’s calm breathing on the other end, contemplative and oddly seductive, and she wishes she could see what her face looks like, wishes she could touch her.

She thumbs the frayed edge of her sofa and sighs.

“I miss you.”

Villanelle hums. “I'm coming to you.”

“Is that safe?” she blurts, and then, “When?”

“In a few days. I have some things to finish here. Konstantin and I will fly together. He wants to see you.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. He said, _hair of my dog, for old times’ sake_ ,” her voice drops to mimic Konstantin’s perfectly, “whatever that means.”

Eve thinks back to that night with him, in the house, when he’d felt to her like a father above all else.

“That’s good. That sounds good.”

“Good. So - you are going to wait for me?”

Eve finds herself craning her neck to stare at the tattered calendar in the kitchen. The page is already on September. Niko can’t have left too long ago.

“I’m waiting.”

“I will see you soon, okay?”

Eve nods to herself.

“Eve?”

“Yeah.”

“I miss you too.”

And then the line cuts off and Eve’s unsaid words hang from her open mouth as she stares at her buzzing phone, one last message flashing on her screen: _Three days. Vx_

_Three days_  turns to two weeks. It gives Eve enough time to unpack and catch up on sleep and the news and her Twitter feed. Enough for her to refamiliarise herself with Sainsburys and restock her fridge (and wine rack) with the bare essentials. Enough for her to open her dreaded Inbox and wade through dozens of spam emails, a single, recent message from Carolyn and several from Jess, who shows up at her house unannounced hours after she shoots off a reply.

They drink and they talk and Eve attempts to make paella, though nowhere near as good as Niko's and certainly not Villanelle's. Jess stares at her occasionally while she speaks and while they lounge on her sofa, as if she were a stranger, as if they hadn't spent countless, long nights together, holed up in offices and pubs, fingers in each other's jars.

Jess tells her about her new baby first. It's something Eve had vaguely expected but completely forgotten about, in and amongst her head-on collision with death's door. She flicks past photos of the little boy on Jess' phone and beams with warm joy, for both of them if not for herself.

Then there's chat about Hugo, about his recovery in St Thomas, the way he'd bragged about his private room overlooking the Thames, _secret agent priveleges and all_. Eve can practically hear the wink that must have gone with it. He can't have stayed mad at her for long.

They don't talk about Niko, though Eve suspects Jess knows more than she lets on, if her abrupt subject change is anything to go by.

And finally, they talk about Villanelle. About _Oksana_ , because that's who she was to Eve now.

Eve expects a barage of questions laced with judgement or resentment, possibly both, for how she'd abandoned her team and her entire network of family and friends. But Jess only listens, eyes curious over the rim of her mug of wine, curious and riveted and completely on Eve's side, which she doesn't expect and which hits her like a ton of bricks. She attempts to gloss over more intimate details that Jess yanks from her anyway, and she's reminded that when it comes down to it, Jess is her mate. Jess is everything Elena was and more. Jess is her confidante and her closest friend and a horny mess as it turns out, reaching to open the second Rioja.

"Fuck me," she sighs, cradling one of Eve's cushions in her lap. "I knew it," she nods morosely, "babe, I could've _called_ it."

"You - _what_?"

"Yeah," Jess takes a big, confident gulp of her drink, then turns to face her. "Most people don't come into work on Sundays, you know that, right?"

Eve shrugs. "You wouldn't know, you were never there."

Jess drops her jaw and scoffs, kicking her foot out to push into Eve's side, knocking her a little. "And the whole Amsterdam thing?" she grins, wriggling her eyebrows. "You just wanted to get a good look at her tits again, I get it. She's - Eve, she's smoking fucking _hot._ If you want to get in touch with your sapphic side, be my guest," - Eve blanches, making a gagging noise as Jess shoves her again - "just - don't get yourself, you know," she makes a stabbing motion, "Okay?"

There's so much softness there, Eve can't help but latch onto Jess' foot and grasp around her ankle, smoothing her fingers over it.

"I kind of like having you around."

"Yeah. You too."

"So, uh," Jess motions to her feet until Eve begins to rub them, just like she'd always done, except this time there are no pregnancy complications, no swollen ankles, only Eve's genuine and whole-hearted affection pouring out. "Are you going to bang her again?"

Eve digs her fingers into the back of her Achilles and keeps squeezing until Jess yells and shoves her off.

"Alright! _Jesus._ All you had to do was say yes, you dickhead."

 

Jess leaves only hours before Villanelle's landing time and subsequent arrival at Eve's front door.

She'd planned to borrow a car or take the Heathrow Express to pick them both up, but Villanelle had insisted she stay home and try not to wait.

When her phone rings just past midnight, Eve shoots up from the sofa and all but races down the hallway. Her heart beats faster. Her hands fly up to her hair nervously, then smooth down her crumpled t-shirt. She tries to pinpoint the feeling: Anticipation? Fear? Excitement? Everything all at once? She takes a deep, steadying breath and opens the door to reveal Villanelle standing on her porch with Konstantin right behind her. They wear matching black waterproofs. He heards most of their luggage and smiles over Villanelle's shoulder, happy but tired.

"You're here."

"We are here," he grins. Eve thinks about hugging him, thinks about hugging Villanelle but doesn't do either. She steps aside to let them both in, not missing the way Villanelle's eyes linger, the hand that brushes against her own as they make their way inside. The door shuts and Konstantin turns to face her, patting her shoulder gently.

"It is good to see you, Eve."

She briefly touches his hand and Villanelle stares at them both, amused, one eyebrow quirked as she waits for an explanation.

Konstantin doesn't give her one and thankfully, she doesn't push. She allows time for Eve to settle him into the spare room, suitcases lugged upstairs where fresh towels and bedding awaits.

"Can I make you something to eat?" Eve leans against the doorframe as she watches Konstantin rid himself of his many layers of clothing until he wears nothing but a white wifebeater and trousers. He slumps onto the bed and looks up at her with kind, familiar eyes.

"I feel fine. Thank you - for letting us stay."

"It's the least I can do."

"I hoped we would meet again under less complicated circumstances but - " he shrugs.

"When do we ever?"

"Sure," he chuckles. Eve had missed that sound. She folds her arms across her chest and waits for him to say goodnight. "We should talk about things in the morning, yes?"

"You mean..."

"Plan of action."

Eve wants to groan, wants to roll her eyes and whine, _must we_ , because she'd so enjoyed having her head three feet in the sand, living out her best fantasy while the rest of the world spun on. Instead, she nods as she says goodnight, because she knows Konstantin is right - they need to come up with a way of reaching out to Carolyn whilst ensuring their guaranteed safety. Just not tonight.

Tonight is for reunions and refuge and the warmth of old friends.

She makes her way downstairs, half-expecting to find Villanelle in her bedroom, sprawled on her bed or raiding her wardrobe. Except she isn't. She's waiting in the kitchen, patient and polite, rising instantly once they spot each other.

"Hi."

"Hello," Villanelle says softly, echoing their many telephone conversations. Eve doesn't leave room for formalities. She takes quick strides across the floor until she can smell the rain coming off her, the floral scent beneath it, until Villanelle is pressed between her and the kitchen counter and there are hands in her hair to pull her close - something Eve had thought about and wanted constantly for the past fortnight. She tilts up to search for Villanelle's mouth.

"Three days?" she whispers around an indignant frown. Villanelle's eyes soften, apologetic, as she palms Eve's cheeks.

"Don't be angry, Eve. I made it, yes? I missed you. Let's not fight."

Eve laughs then, giving in to the kiss she'd been dying for since she left Italy. She'd been worried that her brain had reconstructed everything that had happened, that the loneliness and trauma had given the past few months a rose-tint, waiting to be wiped as soon as she came home. Villanelle's kiss is exactly like she remembers though, firm but giving, sombre and relieved and wanting, wanting, wanting, and Eve puts everything she has into it, rocking them into the cupboards, letting Villanelle put her hands all over her, quiet fingers curling against her shoulder and against her waist and finally between her own.

"Take me to bed."

Villanelle pushes away breathlessly, "You don't want to talk?"

 _So much,_ Eve thinks. She wants to ask about her fortnight away, about every detail she had missed, wants to know what happens next, what happens now that they're in the eye of the storm. But her mouth wants other things tonight, and she pushes on her tiptoes so they're eye-level. "Tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow. Is that alright?"

"Yes. Show me the way. I only know how to get to your bathroom."

That makes her laugh, exhausted and deliriously happy as she pulls Villanelle up the stairs and into the haven of her bed.

 

She wakes up sore and wonderfully present.

She guesses Konstantin is the one in the shower because the house smells of bacon and syrup and coffee, and instantly transports her back to the outskirts of Rome, to the countless breakfasts Villanelle had made for her.

She finds her just as she'd expected - lingering over a pan, humming to something that sounds pompous and regimented, like a national anthem, but Eve won't think to question her. 

The dining table is already laid out. Villanelle's jacket lays flung over the back of the sofa, her shoes and bag beside it. She's Christened Eve's new IKEA-branded toaster as well as her coffee maker and all the other things she remembered to buy on her shopping trip to Croydon. Already there seem to be fragments of Villanelle all over the kitchen and living room.

Eve smiles.

"Good morning."

"Morning," Villanelle grins at her as she passes over a bacon strip, "sleep well, Kill Commander?"

She steps nearer, giving a knowing smile before stealing Villanelle's mug of coffee gratefully, for she hadn't slept at all, not that she was complaining. She takes a gulp, then bites down on the bacon, rolling her eyes at the hungry, obnoxious way Villanelle eyes her. When she's drained half of her Nespresso, she leans against the counter and watches Villanelle finish her breakfast spread.

The silence is comforting - the sizzle of pancake, the snap of the toaster, the sound of the shower shutting off and Konstantin's heavy footsteps upstairs. She could do this, she really could. The thought of a life like this with Villanelle, grounded in familiarity but not so much as to swallow her whole, should frighten her but it doesn't. It fills her with hopeful determination that some day it might really happen.

She reaches out and turns the hob off helpfully, taking the stack of pancakes Villanelle hands her.

As she finds her place at the dining table, she watches Villanelle wipe down the surface, slinging the kitchen towel over her shoulder. It's only then that she realises Villanelle wears her old cooking apron, hair up, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a picture of domesticity if ever Eve saw one. It's incongruous with who Villanelle actually is, but maybe not quite so with who Oksana could be.

"You know, Eve, I would let you."

"What?"

"Be Bonnie. If you wanted."

Eve thinks for a moment, the jump in topic giving her whiplash.

It dawns on her then, pieces of their fight in Tivoli coming back to mind. She leans in her chair, swallowing down the fleeting ache that rises, along with an unstoppable wave of warmth.

"We seem to be headed that way, don't we?"

"We do. Just like you predicted," Villanelle says softly, taking the seat beside her, fingers crawling over her own in a firm clasp as they wait for Konstantin to join them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want more shenanigans and yearning? Come tweet me @vracs1!


End file.
